I knew about “BOMZHA” that it was “Without a Defined Place of Residence”. But I didn't even know about the "WHIP".
But we actually …
… this term, denoting representatives of certain social categories, has had several meanings throughout the history of its existence. In particular, Vladimir Vysotsky wrote about the whips in one of his songs.
Former intelligent people
A well-known researcher of the domestic criminal subculture, Fima Zhiganets, talking about the appearance of scourges in the camps of the GULAG system, notes that these were convicted representatives of the intelligentsia who had no criminal past and were helpless in the face of calls to places of imprisonment - morally and physically unable to cope with the burdens of imprisonment.
Beach (acronym "former intelligent man") in prison ceased to look after himself, could eat anything.
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What did they do
In the 1930s, in Yuri Krymov's novel "Tanker" Derbent ", one of the heroes explains the meaning of the term" scourge "(in his interpretation," scourge ") - this is, first of all, a renegade sailor, a vagabond, often expelled from the ship for misdeeds. The etymology of the word is associated with the English "beach" (beach, coast) - the designation of a sailor wandering around the shore idle.
And Vladimir Vysotsky, in a song written and performed on behalf of the scourging man, spoke of him as a decommissioned sailor who sleeps wherever he has to. Explaining the social status of these vagabonds, Vysotsky called the scourges constantly loitering in search of easy money, people who in the past went on ships on voyages, and then were written off ashore, went down, drank themselves.
Soviet writer Leonid Gabyshev, author of the autobiographical story "Odlyan, or the Air of Freedom", who himself visited a juvenile colony in his youth and subsequently changed many occupations, classified the scourges into three groups: characters - who wandered throughout the USSR, found not far from their homes and completely descended. The latter were not considered people in the colony, because they were always dirty, lousy, such in the MLS did the most "black" work.
The words of Leonid Gabyshev were also confirmed by the Soviet poet and dissident, Vadim Delone, who also published an autobiographical book about his imprisonment (Portraits in a Barbed Frame). Delone wrote that scourges were planted for parasitism and vagrancy, despite the fact that in fact they were shabashniks, seasonal workers. The poet said that the whip in the zone did not have the right to vote and, as a result, could not claim to receive any significant thieves' suit.
American photographer Patrick Murphy, who at one time traveled a lot around the cities of the Soviet Union, describing the work of shabashniki in the USSR, said that the scourges or "bamists" (from the abbreviation BAM - Baikal-Amur Mainline) are people employed in low-skilled jobs, and never recovered after staying in the gulag camps and have not found a more worthy application of their strengths and skills in their lives. Murphy called the Far East the main habitat of Soviet scourges. Vladimir Vysotsky noted that there were also many of them in Magadan and Bodaibo, near the gold mines.
Homeless people came from them
Fima Zhiganets cites several examples from correspondence with his co-authors, who, to one degree or another, prove that the scourges are the “progenitors” of modern homeless people (people without a fixed abode; an option is a homeless person who does not have a job). In Soviet times, such vagrants were practically not called homeless, only scourges.
The scourges were subdivided into "shakers" - beggars at the shops, "tankers" - residents of the collectors, "train station workers" (who worked part-time at the train stations) and others. Bichikha is a scourge's cohabitant, bicharnya is a scourge's dwelling, something like a den. Seasonal workers were transported by trains, which were called scourges (a similar name was given to police UAZs, which delivered whips and simply drunken ones to the sobering-up station).
Zhiganets says that the fundamental difference between a scourge and a homeless person is that the scourge will work (at least for a bottle), but the homeless person will not.
