Vertuhai is who? Where did the word come from and what does it mean?

Surely more than once in movies or TV shows you have heard the word "turntable". This prison warden, overseer, employee of a closed institution - in the opinion of the authors of explanatory dictionaries. But very few people know exactly where this concept came from. In fact, there are several versions and versions that explain the meaning of this word. Let's consider each in more detail.

"Rotating key"

The first version is associated with the keys. The prison controller or the overseer, wandering along the corridors of the prison, always had a large bunch of keys. It is believed that the revolver is a person who constantly rotates, shakes the keys. The slang word Turnkey means "shaking keys" or "rotating keys".

Some believe that this is just a banal translation from English. Others are sure that the theory with the keys is true, because they have a lot of jailers, and ring, irritating prisoners, they are constantly.

"Standing on the tower"

The second version is connected with servicemen who guarded the territory of the zone, standing on the tower. Who is the windswept in the zone? It's a jailer guarding the perimeter. During the performance of their service, these employees constantly had to look around, looking for prisoners who could flee. They looked around, or twirled, or fidgeting.

Hence it turns out that the "vertuhai" is a synonym for a constantly looking person. According to some other versions, jailers were also turning around because they were standing in the cold, in the wind or in the rain. In the old days the towers were not closed, with a wooden floor. The people were freezing there, and they had to constantly move from place to place. And since this very place on the observation tower was very small, it was more like that they just spin in a confined space.

Prisoners on the watchtowers especially disliked the prisoners. "Vertuhai" is a word that at the time was very contemptuous and pejorative. They earned turnkeys well on parcels and transfers for prisoners. Those were obliged not only to share their possessions, but also to pay extra people to the tower so that they would allow them to collect all the transfers thrown through the fence. The "mail order business" in old prisons was very profitable.

The jailer is a rather extensive concept. It could be people who served inside the zone. So called the chiefs and ordinary soldiers who walked along the corridors and looked after the behavior of the prisoners. The jailer is a generalized word, but the revolver is a concrete person standing on the observation tower, on which the fate of the broadcasts for convicts depended.

"Loudly shouting"

The third version is very similar to the second one. It is also connected with soldiers at the tower. It is only considered that the word "vertical" has two meanings. On the one hand - to turn in the cold, looking around and at the same time controlling the escape possibility of the prisoner. On the other hand, "hi" in the jargon of the zeks means "shouting, hating" someone. That is, the soldiers on the towers were not only spinning, but also loudly screaming if someone tried to escape.

Both options are associated with the rotisserie on the observation towers. But for one translation, the word "turn" is important, and for another version - "shout-hayit".

"Vertuhai" is a zek

According to people who have worked for many years in places not so remote, they have never heard that mothers who know the laws and history of their world called the jailers a mover. They can be "fascists", "inspectors", "cops" or "garbage", but not vertices. Why? This is explained by the history of the emergence of the word.

In the era of Stalin's rule, during repressions and numerous prisons, at the time when a large number of repressed people were behind bars, the word "vertuhai" meant not a worker of the colony at all. They called the prisoners so.

At that time, there was a disastrous under-supply of guards in the camps. People simply did not have enough. Where were they taken from? Of course, among the prisoners themselves. They disguised themselves in a special form, which differed from the form of the convicts, and from the overalls of the prison guards. For the supervision and prevention of riots in the territory of Russian prisons, in 1939 alone, over twenty-five thousand convicts worked as rotissers.

In the first years of the war, all the guards who could for health reasons went to the front. There also went to their own free will and prisoners. There were disabled people, women and old people. In the postwar period, the Gulag decides to restore the practice of self-protection of the colonies. Prisoners, working jailers, were then allowed two-week holidays, more transfers and visits with relatives. However, negligent attitude towards the service was unacceptable. For this they could not only return to the general regime, but also extend the term.

"Constantly Looking Back"

Their work was nervous. On the one hand, it is necessary to please the authorities, not to miss what is important and not to offend inadvertently. On the other hand, returning from work to his barracks, it was important to be on the alert, all of a sudden, who would "put on a peak" for work on the "strange" side. And so did the guards, constantly looking around, or "pounding". Gradually, the word "stuck", and they began to call it only as vertuhayami.