Poles in Siberia and the tragic traces of the memory of the Stalinist terror.
Greetings, my dear reader!
Yesterday I came across an article in the Polish online publication newsweek.pl about the Polish village of Bialystok in Siberia. This village is located in the Tomsk region, relatively close to my city, which of course attracted my attention.
In addition, my interest is emphasized by my origin — I once heard from my paternal grandmother that our family has Polish roots. In fact, I don’t know much about it. I had very little contact with my paternal relatives as a child, because my father appeared in my life sporadically and not very often. It happens that way…
And in principle, the national question is of little interest to me, I rather tend to share the postulates of Marxism and look at society from a class point of view :)
Therefore, I was practically not interested in my own family tree. I know that in addition to Russian, I have Polish and Tatar blood, but this, as they say, makes me neither warm nor cold.
After reading the article, I was left with a feeling of understatement. So I decided to supplement and expand this material with historical details and my view of nick. After all, this is the history of the Tomsk Region — my native land!
Perhaps this article turned out to be very long. It touches on many topics that can not be limited to one or two paragraphs… I apologize in advance to my readers if this text bores them. I declare in advance a certain annotation of what will be in this article: the history of the appearance of Poles in Siberia, the history of the village of Bialystok in the Tomsk region, arguments on the topic of the tragedy of the time of the great “Stalinist” terror in the USSR, a story about a mass grave suddenly opened in 1979 on the bank of the Ob, where, among others, there were many victims of this bloody time.
First of all, we will touch on the topic of the appearance of immigrants from Poland in Siberia.
Poles appeared on the land of Kuznetsk 400 years ago, when Russian pioneers began to build border fortifications here. First there was the Tomsk, then the Kuznetsk and Verkhotomsky fortresses.
As you know, the beginning of the XVII century — the time of the Russian-Polish wars. Therefore, the first foreign settlers in the prisons were prisoners of war. Also in these outposts there were also defectors who willingly carried out military service “under the high sovereign’s hand”. They collected yasak (furs, honey, nuts, fish) from the Shors, Teleuts, and Tomsk Tatars.
Another part of the Poles ended up in Siberia as persons in the Russian state service. Polish immigrants in Siberia were called “Lithuania” or Cossacks of the Lithuanian list. This name is associated with their belonging to the historical region of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The total number of “Lithuania” settled in Siberia has not yet been established. According to incomplete data, it reached several hundred, perhaps even several thousand people. In Siberia, Poles enlisted in military service in Tobolsk, Krasnoyarsk, Tomsk, Yeniseysk, Yakutsk and other cities.
The Cossacks of “Lithuania” (as the Poles were then called) were exempt from taxes and had the right to freely engage in grain farming. Some of them performed ambassadorial functions. Near the Kuznetsk fortress was the border with the Dzungars, Kyrgyz, and Abin tribes. Having such privileges, which the Poles at home could not even dream of, they went with great desire to conquer and develop Siberia.
In the XVII century, the number of people of the “Polish breed” in the Kuznetsk prison was significant, about 15 percent of the total number of Cossacks, boyar people and grain farmers.
Eastern Siberia has been used by the Russian state as a place of exile since the 17th century. Boyars, nobles, court nobles, as well as Streltsy, peasants, Posadskys, Old Believers, captured Poles, and Swedes were sent here “for treason”. During this period, the Ural Stone was mainly used by participants of failed palace coups, victims of the intrigues of the next temporary workers. There were Poles among them. At the end of the XVIII century, peasants appeared in the Selenginsky district, exiled by the will of the landowners along with fugitive dissenters from Poland, who received the name “Semey” or “Poles” here. According to the estimates of the Russian historian I. N. Ogloblin, at that time at least 1,500 Poles were exiled to Western Siberia.
In the period from the beginning of the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which legally consolidated its territories as part of Austria-Hungary, Prussia and Russia, the political exile of the participants of the Polish nationalist movement to Siberia began. At the turn of the 1760–70s, the Bar Confederates came to Siberia. The war with the Russian Empire ended in 1772 with the defeat of the Bar Confederation and the emergence of conditions for the 1st partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The tsarist authorities regarded the Confederates who were captured by the Russians as disenfranchised rebels and applied repressions to them, including exile to the Asian part of the empire. The number of exiled Confederates reached, according to various estimates, from 6 to 10 thousand people. Most of them were enlisted as soldiers and Cossacks in the Tomsk and Tobolsk provinces, some were sent to Eastern Siberia, and were assigned to the Nerchinsk mines.
The confederates of the Tobolsk battalion were included in the army that took part in the suppression of the uprising of Emelyan Pugachev (1773). There are known cases of desertion of Poles and their transfer to the side of the Pugachevites. In the 1770s and early 1780s, there were mass cases of Poles converting to Orthodoxy and marrying Siberians. The crossed Confederates often took new names and surnames, which indicates their Russification. Only in Tara in 1771–78 51 people crossed themselves, 23 of them married Siberians. The Russian authorities helped to ensure that the Confederates remained permanently in the Urals, this purpose was served by the decrees of Catherine II concerning those who had converted to Orthodoxy: on the issue of assistance for acquiring an economy in Siberia (1774) and on the issue of feed money (1781). In 1781, exiled Confederates were given the opportunity to return to their homeland. According to Polish researchers, only 90 people remained in Siberia for permanent residence. By 1788, almost all Siberian confederates had converted to Orthodoxy. Somewhere among them, perhaps, are my ancestors on my father’s side.
At the turn of the XVIII–XIX centuries, the participants of the T. Kosciusko uprising (1794) were exiled to Siberia, whose number, according to various estimates, ranged from one to several thousand people. Despite the subsequent decree of Paul I, which allowed all the exiled to return to their homeland, quite a lot of Poles remained in Siberia. The first exiled to Siberia after the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were patriots who secretly assembled detachments in Lithuania (1797) for the legions of J. H. Dombrowski. Some of these exiles, more than 200 people, lived in Southern Siberia in 1804.
Prisoners from the Polish military units that fought on the side of Napoleon were also sent to Siberia and joined the Cossack regiments, being enlisted in the Siberian battalions of the Tomsk and Tobolsk provinces. According to rough estimates, there were about 10 thousand people. When in 1815 they received permission to return to their homeland, a significant part of them remained in Siberia, having made career progress in the service and having acquired families and an economy.
In 1815, after the Congress of Vienna, most of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth became part of Russia under the name of the Kingdom of Poland.
The first political exiles of the Poles of the XIX century began to arrive in Eastern Siberia after the Decembrists. These were participants of the national liberation uprising of 1830. The system of their distribution in Siberia was just developing, so the local authorities were often simply not aware of how and where to organize their life and work. This happened, for example, with Jozef Sosinovich, a nobleman from near Bialystok, who was sentenced to “one of the fortresses of Eastern Siberia” for participating in” active and zealous promotion of the spread of outrageous intentions”, or more simply, for harboring participants in the uprising. Once Sosinovich fought under the banner of Napoleon, was wounded, blinded, went to Siberia accompanied by a servant of the peasant Adam Belyavsky.
In the early 1830s, a broad nationalist movement for independence developed in the territories of the Kingdom of Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. The Russian government actively used political exile to Siberia against its participants. After the suppression of the November uprising of 1830–31, the mass political exile of Poles to Siberia became regular and became one of the sources of the formation of the local Polish diaspora.
According to their legal status, Polish political exiles were divided into several groups: exiled convicts, exiled settlers with or without the deprivation of their rights. In addition, the “political” were assigned to military service in local battalions or prison companies. The convicts were sent to the factories (Irkutsk saltworks, Alexandrovsky, Ilginsky and Catherine distilleries, Nerchinsky mines), the settlers were sent to the provincial expeditions about the exiles, who established places of settlement for them. The supervision of exiled Poles was entrusted to the local administration, but in practice strict conditions of detention were often not observed. Many convicts and exiled settlers had the opportunity to obtain passports and move around the territory of Siberia in order to find sources for their own maintenance, which allowed them to engage in entrepreneurship, trade, and craft. In 1835, the government allowed the exiles to allocate 15 acres of arable land near their places of residence for farming. Relative freedom gave the exiles the opportunity to engage not only in economic activities, but also in scientific research of the region.
Polish researchers and scientists have made a huge and invaluable contribution to the science and research of Siberia. As well as it is impossible to forget the huge contribution to the development of medicine and education in the Siberian region of the Polish representatives of “scientific” professions. Historically, the integration of Poles and Germans into Russian society has always been at a very high level. In multi-ethnic Siberia, people were judged not by their origin, but by their personal qualities. It is not surprising that the names of many respected natives of Poland have always remained in the history of Siberia.
Benedikt Dybovsky, a doctor and zoologist, propagandist of Darwin’s theory of evolution, who was sentenced to 12 years of hard labor and life settlement in Siberia, studied the local fauna, for which he received the Gold Medal of the Russian Geographical Society in 1870. What did Dybovsky do when, as a result of the amnesty of 1877, he could return to his homeland? Came back. For a while. And as a free man, a few months later he went through St. Petersburg, Moscow, Tomsk, Irkutsk, Vladivostok to Kamchatka, where he engaged in the treatment of patients and the development of cultural life. Along the way, he collected a rich linguistic and anthropological material about the Ainu on Sakhalin.
Viktor Godlevsky, researcher of flora and fauna, ornithologist. Listening, the Buryat, who spoke with great reverence about the “sacred sea”, was eager to explore Lake Baikal and the Angara River. A political exile? Yes! But despite this, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Russian Geographical Society in 1870.
Alexander Chekanovsky, who conducted geological research on the Yenisei at the request of the Russian Geographical Society. I worked physically and collected natural data at the same time. Geologist, paleontologist, cartographer, meteorologist. He also has awards from the main scientific board of Russia.
Finally, Jan Chersky, a self-taught man who was exiled to Siberia as a boy, became the curator of the Museum of the Russian Geographical Society in Irkutsk, which classified the bones of mammals. In Russia, he is better known as Ivan Demidovich Chersky (as he himself began to sign his works). Geologist, paleontologist, zoologist, who also has many awards from the Russian Geographical Society and became one of the most famous Polish researchers of Siberia.
Almost every tourist on Lake Baikal knows the “Chersky Stone” — a mountain with a height of almost 730 meters with a viewing platform at the top, which offers a beautiful view of the source of the Angara, Cape Baranchik, the port of Baikal and the surrounding expanses of the lake.
You can talk about hundreds of merchants, doctors, tailors, shoemakers, apothecaries, industrialists… those who are now called businessmen. Finally, the engineers who built the great Trans-Siberian Railway. They came here of their own free will, believing-often without reason-that a great fortune would be revealed to them.
There is also a curious fact, which I think is quite offensive for today’s Polish public opinion: The names of scientists and researchers originally from Poland appear in Russia on memorial plaques, their names are peaks, valleys, ridges and villages — but in the public consciousness of Russians they are not associated with the Polish exiles of the nineteenth century. There is a very simple and at the same time difficult to understand explanation for this. In Siberia, little attention was paid to the origin of man. It has always been a real mix of races and nationalities. The inhabitants of Siberia treated everyone who lived nearby for some time and did not separate themselves from others as their own. “Our man” is a saying that is still in use in Russia, despite the fact that few people know its original meaning. And I must say, I am very impressed with this approach.
And in general, the question of nationality is extremely controversial. Using the example of Jan (Ivan Dementyevich) Chersky, scientists still argue about the origin of this outstanding scientist. In the past centuries, as already mentioned in the article, everyone who came from the territory of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was called “Litvins”. And if you start judging by the current standards, then Ivan Dementievich turns out to be a Belarusian by origin! The Slavic peoples so smoothly flowed into one another in the territories of the current Eastern European states that one can’t help but wonder why all this strained search for differences between us?
The order of distribution and conditions of stay of the Polish insurgents in the Siberian exile had their own peculiarities. Thus, according to the “Rules for the organization of the life of political exiles exiled to Eastern Siberia from the Kingdom of Poland and the Western provinces, “Poles” in the types of providing for their life were distributed according to the approval of the head of the province, applying to the occupation of each.” Exiled Poles who wanted to engage in agricultural labor in the places of settlement were given land. A separate point of the rule was supposed to “ install Poles-artisans, craftsmen and others in state-owned and all private factories available in the provinces.” Those who set up their own household, “with good behavior” could remain in the places of settlement even after the end of the sentence.
This exceptional attitude towards the Poles was dictated, on the one hand, by the chronic shortage of skilled workers in Siberia and Transbaikalia, and, on the other, by the predominance of such scarce working professions among the exiled people.
Exiled Poles were allowed to take their wives with them, if they had any, to receive money transfers from their homeland, and to conduct correspondence. In addition, the Russian government paid for their maintenance. It was not much money, but it was quite enough to live on-114 rubles in silver per year. For example, you could buy a hut for 200 rubles, a loaf of bread for 2 kopecks, and 1 kilogram of Chinese sugar for 40 kopecks. (1 kopeck = 0.01 ruble) That is, you can live.
Here is what the exiled Pole Yu.Rucinski:
“A pood of rye flour, very good, cost 15 groschen, a pood of wheat-40 groschen, a pood of excellent meat-4 zlotys, a four-week-old calf specially fed with milk-5 zlotys, a pair of grouse-10 groschen, wild ducks, black grouses, capercaillies did not even want to buy, they chose only young black grouses and teals. There are a lot of excellent fish and also for a song. In winter, the bazaar was filled with huge quantities of frozen carp, perch, sturgeon, sterlet, pike of monstrous size.”
Poles were brought to the place of exile on carts or sledges. Overnight stay — in Gostiny Dvory. Very often, compassionate Siberians fed the prisoners, treating them with bread, milk, and lard. The usual diet at the stage: breakfast-a cup of milk with bread, lunch-soup with meat, “ cooked in such an amount that was enough for dinner.”
The kindness and cordiality of the local population struck the imagination of foreigners. Polish exile Vincent Migurski wrote:
“As I passed through Siberia, I noticed, and I must admit it directly, that its inhabitants, either because they were still not far from the natural state and were unspoiled, or their ancestors who inhabited this region were also exiles and rejected by society, and from here almost every family had its own traditions and memories, or, finally, because, looking constantly at the endless crowds of passing prisoners, they got used to grief, or perhaps, most tomorrow for you, “but they were extremely polite to us, they are helpful and hospitable.”
All the political exiles were educated people. That is why they were called “political”. Most of the Poles were noblemen, who spoke several foreign languages fluently, and were well versed in European literature, art, philosophy, and theology. It is clear that who, if not they, were to become national enlighteners in illiterate Siberia.
Another topic is Polish-Russian marriages.
Poles willingly married Russian girls. They were mostly young male prisoners of war, not bound by marriage. If one of them was married, not every Polish wife was ready to go with her husband to exile in Siberia. Therefore, young people found their other half in a foreign land.
Here is a certificate left to us by a certain Andrzej Dabkowski:
“To marry a Russian woman is a happiness that you will not always find in your homeland. Russian women are beautiful, hardworking, naive and chaste. They never cheat on their husbands.”
But there was a serious problem for the outlanders who were far away: they professed Catholicism, and their betrothed — Orthodoxy. Such mixed marriages were not officially recognized in Siberia. Therefore, children in Polish-Russian families were considered “unclean”. Their parents were deprived of their rights to their estates, and they were forbidden to leave for Poland.
Often one of the spouses changed their religion. If a Pole accepted Orthodoxy, the family became “Russian”.
Usually a man changed his last name, and thus a certain Ivanitsky became Ivanov, and Vasilevsky — Vasiliev. Historians say that after marrying a Russian girl, the Poles remained in Russia forever and had no desire to return to their homeland.
By the beginning of the XIX century, the “Siberian Poles” had almost lost their national identity. For 200 years, they almost completely disappeared among the local population and began to call themselves Russians.
In 1883, the manifesto of the Tsar of the Russian Empire granted Polish political exiles the right to return to their homeland. But mostly nobles left. Some of the exiles from among the people of unprivileged origin, as well as those who managed to start a family and find work, remained in Siberia. In total, only about 30% of those forcibly sent to Siberia returned to their homeland.
In the XIX century, the economic migration of the inhabitants of Poland to Siberia began. In the second half of the XIX century, with the beginning of economic growth in the region, the entrepreneurial activity of Polish immigrants became noticeable. They organized the production of agricultural machines and sausages in Siberian cities, set up pharmacy business, and were the first restaurateurs. Poles made up a significant part of the teaching staff in Siberia — from rural teachers to university professors.
The Polish agrarian colonization of Siberia began in the 2nd quarter of the XIX century, but its scale was insignificant. Mostly Poles settled in the southern regions of the region, where they started their own economy, engaged in crafts and trade. The free migrants came in groups connected by blood-kinship and neighborly ties. Arriving in Siberia, they sought to create compact settlements, organized their lives, preserving traditional economy, family and religious culture, preserving folklore, in particular costumes, customs and rituals.
The beginning of the mass Polish peasant colonization of Siberia dates back to the 1880s, when Poles from the Radom province arrived in Tomsk Province. They were strong middle-class owners, who prevailed among Polish agrarian migrants until 1890. Their adaptation to Siberian farming conditions, despite considerable difficulties, was generally successful, as exemplified by the Polish peasants of the village of Grinevichi, Tarsky Uyezd, Tomsk Province. In the reports of the Siberian authorities, the industriousness and “serviceability” of the Poles of the settlers in paying taxes are noted. In 1897, peasants made up about 60 % of the Polish diaspora in Siberia.
By the beginning of the revolutionary upheavals in the eastern part of European Russia, in Siberia and in the Urals, there were quite a significant number of Poles. Numerous refugees from the west of the country, as well as Austrian and German prisoners of war of Polish nationality, joined the voluntary settlers and descendants of exiled rebels who lived there before the war. After the revolution, the Poles began active political activity in order to support the independence of their new state. In the East of Russia, Polish self-defense units began to form. In December 1918, the famous French military mission of General Maurice Janin arrived in the East of Russia. He became the commander of the allied forces in the region. The Polish detachments began to obey him. In January 1919, it was decided to form a Polish division out of all the Polish formations (numbering at that time about 8 thousand people). The Polish division took an active part in the Civil War on the side of the whites, which pre-damaged the suspicious attitude of the Bolsheviks towards the Siberian Poles in the future.
About the Siberian Bialystok.
Before the era of the Golden Horde, various tribes settled here — Siberian Scythians, Ostyaks. Then came the peoples mainly belonging to the Turkic-Ugric group, including the nomadic Kirghiz, Siberian Tatars, etc. In the XIII century, Western Siberia began to be inhabited by Mongol-Siberian tribes (primarily Tatars). During the late Golden Horde, the territories became part of the Kingdom of Siberia, the so-called White Horde. It was about this place that the caravan routes from China and Mongolia to the Northern Urals and further to the Russian Pomerania passed, whose merchants in the early Middle Ages, before the Mongol-Tatar rule, reached here on their ships along the rivers from the north, and in large villages there were auctions. Russian Russian government representatives appeared in the middle of the XVI century, the Siberian kingdom voluntarily came under the protectorate of the Russian Crown, in these places there were representatives of the Russian administration, who collected an easy and even voluntary yasak (tax), primarily furs from local tribes. Everything changed in 1561, when Kuchum, the khan of the Nogai Horde, treacherously killed the rulers of the Siberian kingdom (the White Horde), the khans-the brothers Yediger and Bekbulat, seized power and tried to change the ideology. The new khan began to rule the White Horde in the interests of confrontation, hostility, and even war against the Moscow tsar. As a new ideological basis for the Kyrgyz and Tatar tribes, Mohammedanism was introduced, which was then the basis of culture and ideology in the Nogai Horde, in Turkey and the Crimean Khanate. Kuchum began to actively fight with the troops of the Russian Empire. In response, an army was formed under the leadership of the Cossack Yermak, who caused considerable damage to the Siberian Khanate, and the capital of the White Horde was destroyed. At the end of the XVI century, Russian troops from the northern and central Urals marched through the collapsed country of Kuchum. Conflicts and troubles broke out between the tribes of the former White Horde, and the settled Tatars were often offended by nomadic tribes. At the invitation of the Tatar princes (khans), prisons (fortresses) are built in Western Siberia with Cossack armed detachments in them. After the Tobolsk fortress, the Cossacks and Streltsy gosudaryovs began to move up the Ob River, who built the fortresses of Tym, Narym, Tomsk (1604) and others. The territories of the Middle Ob region became the lands of the Russian State.
In the first third of the XIX century, on the basis of the village of Nikolaevsky, the Nikolaevskaya Volost of the Tomsk Uyezd of the Tomsk province was formed. Until the end of the XIX century, there were also nomadic foreign volosts (volosts of local small tribes and peoples — in this case, the Ob Tatars), which independently paid yasak (tax) to the state treasury. As the life of such peoples became settled, their villages became part of the standard national parishes.
At the end of the XIX and the beginning of the XX century, the government of the Russian Empire took steps to populate the empty Siberian spaces with peasants of Central and Western Russia, who would like to enter a wide labor and creative space, which, due to the impoverishment of the local soils, was impossible. In particular, the Stolypin agrarian reform contributed to the widespread migration of people to Siberia. Due to the wide and large spaces that favored the development of peasant, timber, hunting and fishing, and merchant-entrepreneurial activities on the basis of the initiative of the population, serfdom of Siberia, in the Tomsk Ob region, never existed.
At the very end of the XIX century, large masses of the peasant population from the territories of the Baltic, Polish, Western Ukrainian and Belarusian provinces of the Russian Empire began to voluntarily move to the Tomsk province.
In the 1890s, the settlement of Bialystok became the place of the beginning of a new life for Poles, the backbone of which was made up of families moving here from the eponymous city of Bialystok in the Western Russian Grodno province. The city of Bialystok itself, after the vicissitudes of the first half of the XX century, has now become a city of the Polish state. The basis of the way of life of the Siberian Bialystok was the Polish national culture, the Polish and Catholic religion, as well as the joint desire to conduct rational and profitable agriculture. The name of the new settlement is obviously a tribute to homesickness.
The birth of the settlement of Bialystok is considered to be 1898. The main migration of Poles to the Siberian Bialystok took place at the beginning of the XX century, in the 1900s and 1910s.
Earlier, near the newly created Bialystok, the Polish settlement of Malichevsk was formed, where in the mid-1890s, a wooden Catholic church, a Polish church, was built by the residents. Residents of Bialystok also decided to build their own church. The Church of St. Anthony of Padua was built in the period from 1908 to 1910. and consecrated in 1910 by Father Joseph Demikis, rector of the Tomsk Church, dean of the Tomsk Catholic Deanery.
By 1914, the main backbone of the inhabitants of Bialystok were families of voluntary peasants-immigrants of Polish nationality from the Grodno, Sedlet and Vilna provinces of the Russian Empire. Some citizens or Polish families from the Tomsk province, descendants of exiles after the Polish uprising of 1863, as well as some new exiles serving sentences for revolutionary-Marxist activities in the 1890s-1914, also came here. Several Russian families and families with Ukrainian-Belarusian roots also lived in the village.
The economy of the village was quite normal for those years: a mill, grain barns (rye and wheat), a convenience store and a store of agricultural, household and hunting goods.
About the turbulent time in the life of the Polish settlers of Bialystok, about the Soviet power, and so on.
One of the sad pages of the history of the village is the events of October 1905, when, following the mass street riots in Tomsk, which were accused of provoking radical Marxist-socialists of Jewish nationality from the revolutionary militant groups, there was a Jewish pogrom in Bialystok-exiled Marxists of Polish-Baltic Jewish origin were forcibly expelled from their village by religious-monarchist rural activists.
The village lived exactly in the period before both revolutions of 1917 and without any special events survived the Civil War and the re-establishment of Soviet power in December 1919-January 1920. At the same time, if by 1917 the population was about 500 inhabitants, then in 1921, according to the 1921 census, there were 101 households and 589 inhabitants in the village of Bialystok, and according to the 1926 census, there were already 105 households and 592 inhabitants. These data indicate stability and the absence of serious upheavals in this area during the civil wars and the subsequent establishment of Soviet power in the region. Due to the cultural peculiarities characteristic of the Poles, strong peasant families sought to separate themselves from the main village into their own farms, many of which became new villages. By 1917, near Bialystok, first farms were formed (a separate peasant settlement from the village), then the village of Andreevka, the village of Lomnitsk and a number of other settlements in the district became separate settlements. These cultural features were at odds with the plans for the development of the country adopted by the Bolsheviks and led to further conflict between the Polish diaspora and the Soviet government.
After the establishment of Soviet power in the countryside (January 1920), the village poor created the revolutionary committee of the poor, which under the leadership of the volost and district party organization of the RCP (b) (short for the Party of Workers and Peasants of the Bolsheviks)he began to form new government bodies and implement the red suppression of the well-to-do bourgeoisie, together with the Catholic believers. (The Church in pre-revolutionary Russia was one of the main landowners).
The Bolshevik plans for land reform reflected, first of all, the needs of the most numerous peasantry in western and central Russia, with their problems of lack of land, remnants of serfdom and landlord arbitrariness. Among the Polish settlers in Siberia, who did not know all these difficulties and did not see serfdom in Siberia, “equalizing dekulakization” certainly did not cause positive feelings — after all, here often the “kulak” was the most exemplary and hardworking peasant who earned honestly the well-being of his farm.
In addition, the Bolsheviks planned to develop agriculture by creating large joint peasant farms that were more economically efficient. This was extremely unpopular, unusual for the Polish immigrants who cultivated their own family farms. The Tsarist government paid relatively little attention to the regulation of the peasantry in Siberia. This was undoubtedly a temporary phenomenon, but the relative freedom had certainly taken root in the habits of the settlers. And under the close attention of the new government, the conflicts certainly did not take long.
Until the end of the 1920s, attempts were made to form peasant artels and communities for the joint cultivation of land, but the majority of the village population (there were then more than 600 inhabitants) preferred the sole family management of their own economy. At the beginning of the “collectivization” operation, Bialystok also turned out to be one of the most “non-kolkhoz” villages.
In the initially discussed Polish article, there is an indication of some memories of the Catholic church looted by the Bolsheviks in Bialystok. However, this is a partial lie. No one in the year 20–21 robbed the church, did not throw out icons from it and did not beat the bells. But the priest in 21 years really was sent to Tomsk for agitation against collectivization. And in the church itself, until 1929, divine services were held by prior agreement with the village council and the invitation of a priest from Tomsk. In 1921, the priest’s house was requisitioned by the village council to organize an elementary school for the children of the proletarian-rural poor, here the Tomsk People’s Commissariat for National Minorities sent a “national” Polish teacher, Julian Oskarbsky, to work. However, Oskarbsky in 1922 chose to accept Polish citizenship under the Soviet-Polish treaty and repatriate to Poland. Nevertheless, the Polish 4-class school, separated from the church, in Bialystok worked until 1938.
About the bloody regime and “Stalinist” repressions.
On February 11, 1938, unexpected guests knocked on almost all the houses of the village… Thus began the “Polish special operation of the NKVD”, which lasted for 1937–1938, as a result of which 88 people were initially arrested in the village (this is about 60 % of the men of the village). In the future, they were sent to the district center, where the majority were sentenced to capital punishment and shot by the decision of a Special meeting of the NKVD. So the plan to search for Polish defector spies was carried out according to the order of the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR N. I. Ezhova №00485 “On the beginning of a campaign of political repression against persons of Polish nationality”.
On August 11, 1937, one of the bloody “national” operations of the NKVD began — the “Polish” operation under order 00485 “On the elimination of Polish sabotage and espionage groups and organizations of the POV” (Polish Military Organization). According to it, during 1937–1938, 139,815 people were convicted, including 111,071 people — to be shot. And not all of these people were ethnic Poles.
A special non — judicial body was created for the conviction-the “deuce”, a Commission of the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs and the Prosecutor of the USSR. The “Deuce” received lists sewn into “albums” for consideration, their consideration took place in absentia. When the “deuces” ceased to handle the flow in September 1938, they were replaced by Special Troikas, which ended the cases on “national” operations.
This is a scan of a document from the declassified archives of the NKVD.
The document starts like this:
August 11, 1937 Moscow №00485
The closed letter sent together with this order about the fascist-insurgent, espionage, sabotage, defeatist and terrorist activities of the Polish intelligence service in the USSR, as well as the materials of the investigation in the case of “ POV»* they reveal a picture of the long-standing and relatively unpunished sabotage and espionage work of the Polish intelligence service on the territory of the Union.
These materials show that the subversive activities of the Polish intelligence service were carried out and continue to be carried out so openly that the impunity of this activity can only be explained by the poor work of the GUGB bodies and the carelessness of the Chekists.
Even now, the work on the elimination of Polish sabotage and espionage groups and the organization of the Russian Federation is not fully deployed.I ORDER:
1. From August 20, 1937, to launch a broad operation aimed at the complete elimination of the local organizations of the “ POV “ and, above all, its sabotage, espionage and insurgent cadres in industry, transport, state farms and collective farms.
The entire operation must be completed within 3 months, i.e. by November 20, 1937.2. Subject to arrest:
a) the most active members of the “POV”, identified in the course of the investigation and still not wanted, according to the attached list;
b) all remaining military prisoners of the Polish army in the USSR;
c) defectors from Poland, regardless of the time of their transfer to the USSR;
d) political emigrants and political prisoners from Poland;
e) former members of the PPP and other Polish anti-Soviet political parties;
(e) The most active part of the local anti-Soviet nationalist elements in the Polish districts.3. The operation to arrest to be held in two stages:
a) the first shall be the arrest of the above-listed personnel working in the NKVD, in the red army, in munitions factories, shops in the defense of all other plants, rail, water and air transportation, electric power sector of all industries, gas and oil refineries;
b) in the second place, all the others working in industrial enterprises of non-defense significance in state farms, collective farms and institutions are subject to arrest.4. Simultaneously with the deployment of the arrest operation, begin investigative work. The main focus of the investigation is to focus on the complete exposure of the organizers and leaders of the sabotage groups, in order to fully identify the sabotage network.
All spies, saboteurs, and saboteurs who pass under the testimony of the arrested persons should BE IMMEDIATELY ARRESTED.
To conduct the investigation, allocate a special group of operational workers.5. All those arrested, as soon as their guilt is revealed in the course of the investigation, are divided into two categories:
a) the first category, which is subject to execution, which includes all spy, sabotage, wrecking and insurgent personnel of the Polish intelligence service;
b) the second category, the less active of them, subject to imprisonment in prisons and camps, for a period of 5 to 10 years.6.Lists with a summary of the investigative materials describing the degree of guilt of the arrested person are drawn up every 10 days for the first and second categories assigned in the course of the investigation, which are sent for final approval to the NKVD of the USSR.
Assignment to the first or second category on the basis of consideration of investigative materials is made by the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the republic, the head of the NKVD of the region or territory, together with the corresponding prosecutor of the republic, region, or territory.
..that’s it, short and dry, ruthless and inhumane. Arrest, divide, and serve for three months. A number of historians tend to dispute the authenticity of the published archives of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR, pointing out a number of inconsistencies and contradictions in them, but so far I have not seen an absolutely convincing refutation, I prefer to agree with the currently accepted version.
Moving away from the emotional outburst, what I would like to note in this document and what to focus on, this is very important in my opinion.
So, the first — the first lines in the order sounds like:
“The closed letter sent out together with this order about fascist-insurgent, espionage, sabotage, defeatist and terrorist activities…”.
This is also pointed out by supporters of the opinion about the “forgery of fake archival documents”. But I start from the accepted value. So, in 1937, the document already refers to fascism and defeatist activities. I see this as another confirmation of the fact that since the end of 1935, Stalin had already clearly understood the future in the form of a war with the rapidly gaining weight of Germany, and the Soviet Union was taking frantic measures to reorganize the army, rearm and generally prepare to repel German aggression. This is very consistent with the programs for the development of industries developed and adopted in 1935–36 in the USSR, I just recently read historical works on this topic. In general, the myth of Stalin, who was caught by surprise by the Germans , is a myth. Or rather, as I think, the surprise for him was only the date of the attack, he counted on the USSR to buy itself more time to prepare.
The second point that I would like to note in the light of the published archives of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR — I call on society to move away from the” nationalization “ of the issue of repression. Judging by the press, many people now like to actively engage in this, especially in Poland itself. The bloody repressions in the USSR of 37–38 did not concern exclusively the Poles, who were only a small part of the victims of the bloody state machine. This is obvious, for example, if you look at the “neighbor” from the published archival documents: Order of the NKVD of the USSR №00447 of July 30, 1937. On the basis of this order, from August 1937 to November 1938, an operation was carried out to “repress the kulaks. criminals and other anti-Soviet elements who continue to conduct active anti-Soviet subversive activities…”, during which, according to a number of estimates, about 1.7 million people were arrested, 690 thousand people were shot, and about 1 million people were sent to GULAG camps. The operation under this order became the largest mass operation of the Great Terror.
In fact, the Order of the NKVD 00485, as well as similar orders related to other nationalities, is a clarifying “front of work” part of the general program of bloody purges of Soviet society, headed by the Order of the NKVD 00447 and is a single whole.
I do not fully share the generally accepted assessment of the scale of the Great Terror and tend to agree with historians who consider these figures to be overstated, but from a human point of view, even a significant reduction in these figures does not change the horror of the tragedy of the inhabitants of the Soviet Union.
The term “Great Terror” was first used by the British historian Rovert Conquest in his book “The Great Terror”. In the post-Stalinist USSR, the period of repression in 1937–1938 was called “Ezhovshchina” after the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs N. I. Ezhov, who held the post at the specified time.
The reasons for the “Great Terror” — the topic for a huge scientific article. And in my personal opinion, only a part of them has historical overtones, but I will write about this a little further. I will now briefly mention the historical background to the tragedy.
After the collapse of the era of the NEP (New Economic Policy) (1927), the circle of persons who were subjected to administrative pressure and harassment by law enforcement agencies expanded in the Soviet Union. The strategy of increasing agricultural productivity in the country through forced collectivization (since 1928) and the program of dekulakization (since 1929) caused local protests, riots and uprisings. The change in rural order, combined with forced industrialization, has led to a surge in internal migration. At least 23 million people moved from the countryside to the city between 1926 and 1939, exacerbating an already difficult situation with food supplies and crime rates.
As a result of a short-sighted and erroneous economic program in the country, there was a crisis of agriculture in the USSR in the early 30s, which, together with a number of other factors, including weather, led to such a phenomenon as the “Holodomor” in the USSR in 32–33. By the way, this is an extremely shameful example from Ukrainian nationalists, how actively historical events are “nationalized” and history is rewritten in favor of someone’s current interests.
In response to the public outcry caused by these changes, internal passports were introduced for the urban population. Undesirable “ elements “were forcibly evicted from the cities to the so-called workers ‘or”special settlements”. In the Tomsk region, by the way, there are terrible examples of this program, from the details of the implementation of which the blood runs cold. The means of prosecution, however, remained imperfect: according to the internal affairs bodies, about a third of the deported Kulaks (from 600 thousand to 700 thousand) escaped from the settlements. The flight and migration of the former kulaks threatened the “success” of the dekulakization campaign and attracted Stalin’s attention. According to Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD since the fall of 1936, the united groups of kulaks by sabotage and subversion posed a serious threat to the Soviet Union.
Stalin’s appointment of general, equal, secret ballot elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in December 1937 worried many leading party functionaries. First of all, it seemed to them that the persecuted churchmen and “kulaks” would unite with other “enemies” of the Soviet government and be able to influence it in the elections. The fears were also caused by the fact that the” Stalinist constitution “ of 1936 granted all rights to hundreds of thousands of persecuted people. The party elite on the ground feared that the balance of power might tilt against them.
External factors were also added to the internal socio-political factors. The Soviet government was afraid of aggressive countries, primarily Germany, Poland, and Japan. The propaganda of the USSR carried these fears and assumptions to the people: everywhere there were enemies, spies. conspirators, saboteurs, and wreckers who weakened the country from within. Measures were taken against the strengthening of the anti-Soviet “fifth column”, the appearance of which became apparent during the Spanish Civil War of 1936.
In accordance with the order, the repressions were carried out on the basis of approximate “planned figures”, which the local people’s commissars were forbidden to independently exceed. Reducing the numbers was allowed. Subsequently, the “planned limits” were repeatedly exceeded by middle-level managers and NKVD bodies.
The “planned nature” of everything and the trail of bureaucracy that formed behind it due to the incompetence of those responsible is one of the cornerstones of most of the troubles of the USSR in my opinion. This was complemented by a low degree of interest, involvement, empathy and humanism of the governing authorities themselves.
But now will be a very important moment!
It has always seemed to me, when it came to assessing historical tragedies, that society’s view of their causes is very superficial and we carefully avoid something very important and essential. We enclose the essence of the tragedy in the framework of the system and distance ourselves from it, but we must realize that behind all the evil there are specific living people who embodied it. The root of the problem is not in finding those responsible somewhere in the country’s leadership. It was the people themselves, the society, who profoundly condoned the creation of an atmosphere of evil. Direct performers on the ground “curried favor” with the management, reporting on the increase in indicators to extract some of their own results. Then denunciations. Well, or in other words, “timely informing the authorities about violations” — which actually turned into a mass creation of slander. Denunciations were written by everyone and on everyone. I don’t like my neighbor — he scribbled a denunciation, embellishing some trifle, or even just slandering a person for the sake of some benefits received during his repression.
So we started the conversation with a discussion of Polish immigrants in Siberia in general and in Bialystok in particular. The arrests of 1937 in Bialystok did not begin because some mythical mustachioed villain in the Kremlin got up in the morning with the wrong foot and suddenly decided, and not whether I should annihilate all the Poles in Bialystok for a change? No. The investigative mechanism of the NKVD did not start spinning by itself, but after receiving denunciations of anti-Soviet activities. Which were written by a neighbor on a neighbor, a Pole on a Pole. Perhaps it was simply because he had a better plot of land… I want to quote the phrase of the famous writer Sergey Dovlatov:
“We endlessly scold only Comrade Stalin, and, of course, for the cause. And yet I want to ask-who wrote the four million denunciations?”
The system of denunciations was not the root cause of the Great Terror, but it was the catalyst that repeatedly increased the severity of what the state had done. In no small measure, society itself is to blame for the tragedy that has befallen it!
Recently I read — it turns out that there are scientific works on this topic and my opinion repeats the conclusions of famous cultural historians of the Stalinist period, such as E. A. Dobrenko, S. Fitzpatrick, E. Naiman, K. Clark, T. Lahusen, I. Khalfin and O. Kharkhodin-the source of terror, in their opinion, was not in the regime, but in the masses themselves, in a backward political culture that reproduced the regime that institutionalized mass aggression and collective disregard for the individual.
It is also worth talking about a typical problem of the Soviet Union — the inability to recognize and draw the right conclusions from mistakes. In 1938, the country’s leadership realized the scale of what had been done, and Yezhov was removed from office, and later arrested, tried, and executed. According to the testimony of the aircraft designer Yakovlev, in 1941, Stalin privately spoke about Ezhov:
“…he killed many innocent people. We shot him for it.”
The executive bodies were sent circulars with instructions to “slow down the zeal of the fight against the enemies of the people” and instructions to take up the revision of previously fabricated cases. Which of course gave a weak effect, and in general, the flywheel of repression by inertia swung in the opposite direction, and now the department under the leadership of Beria pursued and destroyed primarily the followers of Ezhov. And in this I only see confirmation of the fact of a deep disease of the society itself.
Terrible traces of the Great Terror in Siberia in the Tomsk region.
However, let’s return to the village of Bialystok in the Tomsk region and the Polish immigrants. I would like to draw your attention again to the article in the Polish edition that started our discussion. Once again, I would like to note the simplified style of presentation of the material, which glues the labels that are apparently familiar to the Polish reader. I have already mentioned the lie about the church that was looted by the Bolsheviks in 1920. It worked for its intended purpose for almost 10 years after the establishment of Soviet power in Bialystok, and only in the 30s it was closed and the building was used for other purposes.
Next, I would like to note this speech turn in the article (quote):
The clouds thickened during the First World War, when the mobilization began, but the most terrible tragedy awaited the local residents in 1937–1938. Most of the men aged 16–60 were shot, and their bodies were buried in an unmarked grave in Kolpashevsky Yar near Oka…
A typical example of how a little understatement in the media helps to put the story in the usual line of the legend about the genocide of Poles by the Bolsheviks.
First of all the name of the river is not Oka but Ob! These are completely different rivers that are very far from each other. But I think this is just a typo by the author of the article.
First, the beginning of the phrase is phonetically associated with the second half, but in fact it refers to the time of tsarist Russia. The Polish population, accustomed to Siberian freedom, accepted the demands to obey the laws of the country even before the Bolsheviks came to power.
The second half of the sentence asserts a direct and full-fledged investigative link between the major arrests in Bialystok in 1937 and the burial in Kolpashevsky Yar on the bank of the Ob River. However, there is no evidence of a direct connection. Kolpashevo is located at a distance of 60 kilometers from Bialystok. The burial in Kolpashevsky Yar is documented in the general period of the Great Terror. The descendants of Polish immigrants could theoretically be there, but it is quite obvious that the burial includes the total number of victims of terror (and not only). In addition, it is not a reliable fact that all the arrested residents of Bialystok were shot, with a high degree of probability it can be assumed that for a significant part of the detainees, the result was sentences with a camp term of 5–10 years.
This does not detract from the size of the tragedy, but it definitely does not give the right to represent these historical events as the deliberate destruction of Poles by the Bolsheviks. The nationalist color in the estimates of the time of the Bloody Terror is absolutely inappropriate, its essence we have already discussed earlier. It is strange to see nationalist motives in an article whose epilogue is a thesis about peace, harmony, dialogue of religions and different nationalities…
With the criticism of the article, I have everything. I continue the extended narrative of the events described in the article.
The town of Kolpashevo (according to the last census, a little more than 20,000 people) it stands on the high bank of the Ob River. The river makes a turn there, and every year it “eats” several meters of a high sandy cliff, getting closer and closer to the extreme houses along Lenin and Dzerzhinsky Streets.
Every year, the Ob River washes away about 15 meters of the Kolpashevsky bank. In the place where the riverbed is now located, there were once houses. The Ob has changed the high right bank beyond recognition. Even at the beginning of the XX century, it sloped down to the water, to the pier, now it can be seen like this only in the area of the new, transferred city pier. Kolpashevsky Yar is a completely sheer cliff as high as a three-story house. From time to time, part of the shore is washed away by water and it falls down. Most often this happens in late spring or early summer, when the water level in the Ob River noticeably rises, and especially on those days when the south wind drives waves to the Yar. In recent years, Kolpashev residents living near this cliff are anxiously waiting for the onset of spring. If the Ob continues to advance on Kolpashevo with the same speed, then in the coming years, Dzerzhinskiy and Narymskaya streets will completely disappear from the city map. Taking away several meters of land from the shore every year, the cliff causes a lot of trouble. Almost every year, families have to be resettled from the collapse zone.
Kolpashevsky Yar is of considerable interest to archaeologists. Repeatedly after the collapse, the remains of prehistoric animals were found here: mammoths, woolly rhinos and other prehistoric artifacts.
The place gained worldwide fame after the Yar slope (part of Dzerzhinskiy Street) washed away by spring waters on the night of April 30 to May 1, 1979, collapsed into the Ob River and revealed several mass graves of people who were shot and otherwise died in the local department for the special Narym district of the NKVD Siblag in the 1930s.
The city functioned as an exiled prison in the pre-Soviet period. In 1937, the NKVD prison was located here and Kolpashevo became the center of the huge Narym region. The building of the district department of the NKVD, according to eyewitnesses of the events, was located 30–40 meters from the bank of the Ob River, surrounded by about a three-meter fence around the perimeter of 150x150 meters. At the top, in addition, there was a barbed wire strung. Three watchtowers towered over the fence. Not far from the NKVD building there was a prison building consisting of 6 cells. The prisoners and those sentenced to death were held here. From archival data, it is known that during the Great Terror (1937–38), pits were dug in a specially designated area in the courtyard of the prison with platforms leading to them. Here they carried out death sentences and buried the executed.
In 1979-just before May Day, on April 30-another two meters of sand slope slid into the water. And from the vertical wall appeared the arms, legs, and heads of the people buried there. A multi-meter burial ground was exposed, in which people were laid in a dense stack, in layers. In the upper layer of the body completely decayed, and in the lower-very well preserved, mummified in clean sand.
- says Ernst Walter, who served as the head of the Kolpashevsky police department in 1979:
“These are May Day holidays, and I was responsible for the district department, acting as the head. I was told there were two bodies on the beach. When I arrived, I looked, and it became clear that it was from Yar. It was a flatbread — a parchment flatbread. And in the water, it decomposed and swelled. And it turned out that it was like a person. He wasn’t quartered — it’s a whole human corpse”.
The opened section of the burial had dimensions up to four meters wide and up to three meters deep. The corpses in the grave were stacked in piles, and if the upper ones were completely decayed, the lower ones were extremely well preserved, even by the faces of the deceased could be identified. Or rather, the dead. There were bullet holes in the back of almost all the skulls. Many skulls had two of them, and the second bullet hole was on the temporal bone of the head.
The event was very unfortunate. In the country-the peak of the era of “developed socialism”, the rehabilitation of Stalinism (with portraits of the “Leader” on the windshields of cars and buses in cities and villages), and, most importantly, the completion of preparations for a broad celebration of the main ideological holiday of the year for all communists “May 1”, for which both the city of Kolpashevo and the Kolpashevsky district separately, and the entire Tomsk region, the entire Soviet country as a whole. All the authorities, all the party functionaries are involved in ensuring the event-it is necessary to quickly put together and arrange, decorate the podium for the leaders of the city and district, from which they should greet the festive demonstration of the workers — in a single burst of joy, the communists and non-party members should march together, in colorful columns of workers of local enterprises and state institutions.
The first to discover the burial of the boy. Boys are always far from ideology and sometimes do not orient themselves in matters of morality. They always play everywhere, and if the games surprise others — it is much more interesting. The mass burial ground did not frighten them, but rather attracted them. Skulls were taken from skeletons (the top layer of corpses had decomposed over several decades) and first thrown into the waters of the Ob. Then, putting the skulls on sticks, they ran around the city with them in order to scare the girls.
The news of the discovery of hundreds of dead instantly spreads throughout the small town. Voices were heard to reburial people and open mass graves. The reburial, with the examination of each of the dead, threatened to be a grand event. A lot of people had gathered on the beach: both curious people and those who remembered what had happened at this place in 1937 came here.
According to the testimony of Anatoly Spragovsky, a former NKVD/KGB employee, more than 90 % of the investigative cases against convicts were grossly falsified by employees of the Tomsk and Narym departments of the NKVD. Mass repressions were also forced by the control figures of exposure and neutralization, which were lowered “from above”. Many of them were charged with fabricated charges of belonging to a mythical socialist-revolutionary-monarchist organization. The shootings were clearly of a group nature — as it was in fact in the late 1930s. Plank decks were constructed (they were also called “boxes”). The dimensions of each such “box” were 3–4 meters in length, 2–3 meters in width and a little more than a meter vertically. The prison was usually visited in stages of 40–50 people. After the execution of the sentences, the corpses were packed tightly with a “jack”, sprinkled with lime (for disinfection and so as not to bury them again before the arrival of the next batch) in the holes dug in the courtyard. Subsequently, in 1938, when the flow of convicts increased dramatically, the executed began to be buried under the floor of the cell. The pits with the corpses, as the instructions said, were compared to the ground and were not marked with anything.
In the afternoon, the city and district (communist and executive) authorities come out of their initial stupor. The soldiers of the construction battalion were urgently moved to the site, who fenced off the opened burial site with a fence. Here are also sent vigilantes (activists from the party committees and Komsomol committees of enterprises and institutions), who organized a duty at the mass grave and on the approaches to it, not allowing people to even look at the victims of the Stalinist years out of the corner of their eyes. The militia outfit, reinforced by the vigilantes, remained here all night and all the next holiday. It’s one thing to drive away just curious people and young people who are stirred up by an extraordinary event in the town. Another thing is to prevent the discovery of corpses of people who believe that their relative has perished here. … The relatives of those who disappeared without a trace in the dungeons of the Kolpashevsky NKVD were walking to the open grave. Children and wives, brothers and sisters. Many of them thought that among the stacked corpses, they would certainly recognize their loved ones by their clothes.
There were no attempts to make a forensic medical examination of the corpses (and the lower layers were preserved relatively well), the local authorities decided to wait for special orders from their superiors. The authorities focused the attention of all the leaders of the party-Komsomol and Soviet district-city apparatus, heads of industrial enterprises, local industry enterprises, city institutions, transport, communications and military units on the May Day holiday and on distracting citizens from the mass grave that had opened.
After the May Day demonstration, the first Secretary of the Tomsk Regional Committee of the CPSU, Yu. K. Ligachev, and the head of the KGB department for the Tomsk region, Colonel K. M. Ivanov, informed the responsible employees of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the KGB of the USSR about the discovered burial (in particular, members of the Politburo, secretaries of the Central Committee of the CPSU, M. A. Suslov and Yu.V. Andropov). There it was decided to prevent publicity, with the aim of which it was indicated to destroy both the remains and the signs of this and other similar Kolpashev burials.
It was not possible to work with equipment on the edge of a crumbling cliff with an unstable soil structure due to washouts and possible burials. At the meeting in Tomsk, it was decided to eliminate the grave from the water, to wash away the shore with the flow from the propellers of motor ships, while the remains of the corpses will be drowned in the river. The operation to destroy the burial was carried out by employees of the KGB units of the USSR. The head of the regional department of state security K. M. Ivanov and the secretary of the regional committee of the CPSU A. I. Bortnikov personally arrived at the site of the discovery of the burial in the city of Kolpashevo. Major-General of the KGB A. I. arrived from Moscow. Fokine. A cover-up operation was carried out under their direct supervision. At the same time, the area of the mass grave was cordoned off by the soldiers of the arrived units of the KGB troops of the USSR.
The Kolpashevsky city prosecutor and the head of the Police Department of Internal Affairs were instructed not to conduct any checks on the examination of corpses from this burial, they were informed that the burial of corpses would be done without conducting a forensic medical examination at the place of discovery. The party leader A. I. Bortnikov collected the party and economic assets of the city and reported that it should be assumed that the exposed burial site contains deserters who were shot during the war. They were shot according to the laws of wartime.
Public opinion in Tomsk and the Tomsk region already in the 1980s negatively assessed the fact of concealment of crimes by the party leaders of the region.
On May 3, the burial site was surrounded by a high fence with the inscription “Sanitary zone”. Security guards appeared near the area to prevent people from bringing flowers and putting candles. Of course, no one really thought about the question of reburying the remains, as the local population demanded. He, this population, was told: Here’s more! We will not reburial the enemies of the people here…
To wash away the shore, the KGB officers involved two river boats — the most powerful two-thousand-ton tugs of the OT series. First, one motor ship, reinforced with steel cables to the shore structures, turned its screws towards the yar and the grave, and began to create a jet of water at full power to wash away the slope. Then the second motor ship was also involved. But the shore gave way badly, and there were problems with the corpses, too. Some of them, as expected by the organizers of the special operation, were chopped and crushed by the propellers of motor ships. But most of the corpses were carried all over the river. The work of the ship’s propellers was washed away by a yar with a height of about forty meters. When the bank collapsed, two more mass grave pits were discovered. One contained human remains, the other preserved mummified corpses. With a high degree of probability, it can be argued that one of these burials is a “cholera cemetery” — it is known that in the church plot, on the edge of which the territory of the Kolpashevsky Yar burial site was actually located in pre-revolutionary times, a mass burial of the victims of the cholera epidemic was committed. Since in 1979, everyone in the area dug through the pits in search of other possible graves and found nothing else, this assumption is certainly true.
In addition there is the following information about the burial in the archival materials of the case:
“I, Levitsky Yuri Alekseevich, a participant of the Great Patriotic War, after demobilization in 1947, was sent to operational work in the state security bodies by the Kirov district party Committee of the city of Tomsk. I worked in the law enforcement agencies until 1956… I worked in the Tomsk regional department for several months and was sent to Kolpashevo. From December ’48 to the end of’ 55, I was here and worked on operational work. When I got here, I went to work… I was ordered to review the archive files on the political exile of the late 20s-early 30s….
… There was another cabinet next to it, in room 17 , as I remember, there were cases on deserters in gray, nondescript crusts, it was the most diverse audience. Either someone was hiding from the draft in the Red Army, or deserted from the army, they were hiding here in the Narym taiga. These were not isolated facts, these cases were many, not a few and not dozens… In wartime conditions, they were treated very simply: they were caught in the taiga and all were taken to Kolpashevo as the center of the Narym district, they were tried and sentenced to capital punishment. And then they were buried in this very ill-fated pit in question… I heard from the guys where this pit was, there was an internal prison of the MGB, this prison was inherited from the Narym district department of the NKVD, that it was inherited from the OGPU, and they got it from the Kolchak people. It must be assumed that the filling of these pits began under Kolchak. In the 1920s, in the fight against banditry, these pits were also filled, in 37–38, these pits were filled with victims of the terror unleashed by the authorities at that time, and finally the corpses of those who were shot as a deserter were added there. These were the terms of this pit. There were three of them, the pits…»
Yes… raking up the traces of history is sometimes very difficult.
When the shore was washed away, the remains and mummified corpses began to fall into the river. One of the captains of the ships says: “Corpses from the pits began to fall into the water. The frozen upper layer of the earth collapsed in large chunks as the lower thawed layer of the soil was eroded. There were many holes. The corpses were whole, of various sizes… At this time, wells were being drilled on the shore, and undetected burials were being searched for… And here are the words of one of the senior assistants of the captain of the tugboat:
“The engines overheated, we broke off (the cable broke), we moved away several times. We were told that this is a sanitary event. They told us not to talk about it. … Boats were working downstream, catching those who swam away, who were not crushed by the screws.”
In the course of the special operation, some of the corpses were spread over a long distance along the banks of the Ob River. Until September, KGB officers downstream made regular surveys of the banks of the main and flowing channels of the Ob River. When corpses and remains were found, without conducting a forensic study, they were buried without marking the place — basically, overflowing on the fairway.
For years ago, in 1979, the Soviet authorities closed the criminal case, the search for those responsible for mass repression, with subsequent criminal prosecution, did not begin. They did not initiate an investigation after the collapse of the USSR, in the 1990s and later, on the fact of concealing traces of a crime.
The unwillingness to admit the tragic mistakes and crimes of the past played a bad joke with the Soviet government. Instead of rejecting excesses and finding new supporters, it has raised generations who have become completely disillusioned with it by lying and denying the obvious.
What about Bialystok?
After the Great Terror, when the Second World War (the Great Patriotic War) began, the men and young men of working age who remained in the village (Poles were not taken to the front in the Soviet Army until 1943) were mobilized to the labor army and sent to work in the mines of Kuzbass in Prokopyevsk. Many of them died in these hard jobs. The main burden of state supplies of food crops and fodder, as well as livestock products, fell on the shoulders of women, including the elderly and teenage girls from the age of 13. In the winter, all of them were required to work in logging. However, it is not necessary to look for a catch here and discuss the “bloody regime”. This was almost everywhere in the country, which gathered all its forces and gave everything it had and even more in the fight against the fascist invaders.
In the late 1950s, all the repressed were rehabilitated, but their relatives and friends for many years could not find out the truth about the events that took place in the village in 1937–1938, to find out the reason for their arrest, the composition of the charges, the date and place of exile or execution.
In general, we can say that until now, the village of Bialystok after the war lived quietly and calmly, without any serious incidents.
Currently, about 240 people live in the village, there are some shops, a paramedic and midwife station, as well as a kindergarten and an elementary school, a cultural center of the Polish autonomy (autonomous cultural and national public organization), a rural House of Culture with a Museum of the history of the village.
The economy is represented by the central industrial base of the SEC “Bialystok”, on the basis of which a modern livestock complex was opened in 2015 — the only breeding plant for breeding Ayrshire cattle outside the Urals. Here, in particular, a modern automated complex contains up to 2000 heads of cattle, half of which are cash cows. There is a division for the production of dairy products.
On June 21, 2003, in the village of Bialystok, Tomsk region, a memorial to the memory of the village residents — victims of mass terror during the Stalinist repressions and those who died on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War-was inaugurated.
The memorial is a four-meter metal cross with a crown of thorns made of barbed wire in the middle and a long list of names carved on marble slabs of those who were shot in 1937–1938 and died in the GULAG and on the fronts during the war. In the center in front of the Memorial Cross is a marble slab with a concise inscription: “WE GRIEVE and REMEMBER.”
The village Church of St. Anthony of Padua, built in 1908, was closed by the Soviet authorities in 1940, as part of the fight against the opposition of the Polish community to the organization of a collective farm in Bialystok. In the building of the former temple, a granary was first built. Then the village club. The church was returned to the local Catholic community only in 1990. On the night of April 18–19, 2017, the church completely burned down. On June 5, 2017, at the initiative of the Catholic Community of Tomsk, fundraising for the restoration of the church began.
On June 12, on the eve of the day of remembrance of the most venerable Saint Anthony of Padua in the Catholic world, a church restored after a fire in the village of Bialystok in the Pudovsky rural settlement of the Krivosheinsky district of the Tomsk region was re-consecrated in the name of this Saint.
The village of Bialystok is now known not only in the Tomsk region, but also in Russia. Thanks to the published books and publications of Vasily Hanevich, a Tomsk historian and “memorialist”, a native of this village, many people know about him well in distant Poland. It is known not only as a village founded by Poles a hundred years ago in the north of the Tomsk province, a village with a wooden church-a rural shrine, but also the tragic fate of its inhabitants during the years of Stalin’s terror.
According to official data, about 2 thousand Poles live in Tomsk. However, there may be many times more of them, especially if you consider that almost every Russian person has Polish blood. After all, our peoples are connected by a long history. This is especially true for Poles and Tomichi.
