FROM THE REPORT OF THE CITY MANAGEMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICE ENTERPRISES AND WORK FOR THE WAR YEAR FROM JUNE 1941 TO JUNE 1942.
SECTION "FUNERAL CASE"
April 5, 1943
Secret
VI. Funeral business. Burying the corpses of people - victims of enemy bombing, shelling and blockade.
The organization and conduct of burials of human corpses in the city are entrusted to the Funeral Business trust, subordinate to the administration. The burial took place in 11 operating city cemeteries managed by the trust.
During the first half of 1941, the Funeral Business trust buried 18,909 dead people, which is an average of 105 per day.
To serve the burial needs of the population, by the beginning of the war the trust had: a) transport for transporting the dead to cemeteries in the amount of 12 buses and 34 horses; b) carpentry and wreath workshops, producing coffins, wreaths and fully satisfying the demand of the population; c) monumental workshops that manufactured and installed monuments, fences, etc.
By the beginning of the war, the cemeteries were served by 109 gravediggers, 64 cleaners and 77 watchmen.
The burial work proceeded normally without any difficulties.
At the same time, still in Peaceful time, the headquarters of the city's MPVO, through its management, entrusted the "Funeral Business" trust with the development and implementation of measures for cleaning and transportation from lesions to cemeteries, registration and burial of the corpses of people who were victims of aerial bombing and artillery shelling.
But, in addition to the outlines for the formation of the "Funeral Business" trust special squad nothing was done from trust vehicles and cemetery workers to remove human corpses from hot spots and transport them to cemeteries.
Start Patriotic War and the approach of enemy troops to the city of Leningrad forced the trust and management to urgently carry out a number of measures to prepare for the transportation of human corpses from the lesions to cemeteries, registration of documents for them and burial.
In July 1941, at the request of the administration and trust, the last Architectural and Planning Department of the Leningrad City Council executive committee was allocated land plots for the needs of burying possible victims of enemy bombing and artillery shelling in the following places:
1. The right bank of the Neva - near Vesyoly Poselok - Volodarsky district.
2. Old village- north of the Serafimovsky cemetery - Primorsky district.
3. Kurakina road - near the station. Kupchino - Moskovsky district.
4. Krasnokabatskoe highway - Kirovsky district.
5. East of the Bogoslovskoe cemetery is the Red Guard district.
6. Bolshaya Okhta - east of the Bolsheokhtinsky cemetery - Krasnogvardeisky district.
7. Volkova village - southwest of the Tatar cemetery - Moskovsky district.
8. Dekabristov Island - from the embankment of the Smolenka River - Vasilyevsky Island.
During July and the first half of August 1941, the Pokhoronnoye Delo trust built economically on the first 6 newly allocated land plots. light type boardwalk morgues. They were intended to store human corpses from the moment they were delivered from the lesions to burial. Temporary morgues were not built on the last two plots of land, since there were ready-made buildings next to them, which were used as morgues. The morgues were equipped with wooden trestle beds, covered with oilcloth, for storing corpses brought from the lesions on them.
From the moment the construction of morgues began, i.e. from the first days of July 1941 until the first days of November 1941, by the forces of the workers of the Funeral Business trust, and partly by the forces of workers attracted by the executive committees of the district councils of workers' deputies, 280 trenches measuring 20x2.5x1.7 meters were dug on the allocated land plots. A more significant supply of trenches was dug at special sites near the Bolsheokhtinsky cemetery and on Dekabristov Island. Morgues and dug trenches at special sites on Kurakina Road - near the station. There was no need to use Kupchino and Krasnokabatskoe highway, because at the end of August 1941, they found themselves in a zone of military operations and intense enemy shelling.
In the first days of the Patriotic War, under the management of the Funeral Business trust, a detachment of 21 people was formed from the workers of the latter’s enterprises with 4 buses assigned to it. The personnel of the detachment were provided with rubber boots, aprons, gloves and transferred to barracks position, and the duty unit was on round-the-clock duty under the management of the trust. Permanent representatives were seconded from the detachment to the city's medical and sanitary service for live communication, through whom the medical and sanitary service of the city's MPVO headquarters called teams and detachment vehicles to the affected areas for cleaning up corpses and transporting them to morgues.
From the beginning of the Patriotic War, the period from June 22 to September 8, 1941 was a tense organizational and preparatory period for the city’s air defense in all areas, including in the burial area. The systematic bombing that began on September 8, 1941, and later artillery shelling of the city, was accompanied by destruction and casualties. From this time on, the intense work of the “Funeral Affairs” trust team begins. The detachment's teams, at the direction of their permanent representative at the medical and sanitary service of the city's MPVO headquarters, go around the clock to the affected areas, remove the corpses of people - victims of bombing and shelling, transport them to morgues at special sites, where the corpses were laid out on trestle beds and, in accordance with instructions approved headquarters of the city's MPVO, were kept for 48 hours for identification by relatives.
During the first period of bombing and artillery shelling, 80-85% of the corpses delivered to morgues from the affected areas were identified by relatives and buried in the usual individual manner in city cemeteries. After 48 hours, unidentified corpses were photographed by a representative of the relevant police department assigned to the morgues, identification reports were drawn up, based on the acts of the police representative and doctors, death certificates were issued in the registry office, after which such corpses were buried in trenches by cemetery workers assigned to special sites. Above each person buried in a trench, a wooden column painted red was installed, on which the surname of the person buried was written, and if it was impossible to establish the identity, it was written - “Unknown”. The valuables found on the corpses were confiscated by a police representative and the latter, according to acts, were handed over to representatives of the relevant district councils. The morgues, built on special sites, where the corpses of people who had become victims of enemy bombing and artillery shelling were delivered from all areas of defeat, mainly by transport from the “Funeral Business” trust detachment, presented an eerie sight. Here one could see mutilated, disfigured corpses of people, parts of corpses, i.e. severed heads, legs, arms, crushed skulls, corpses of infants, corpses of women with the corpses of infants and other ages of children tightly hugged in the agony of death. In the morgues from morning until dark, people with sad, embittered faces wandered around and looked for: parents - dead children, children - dead parents, brothers - sisters, sisters - brothers and just acquaintances.
As the bombing increased, so did the number of burials from month to month, as evidenced by the following figures:
July 1941 - 3688 burials
August 1941 - 5090 >>
September 1941 - 7820 >>
October 1941 - 9355 >>
November 1941 - 11,401 >>
Despite the significant month-on-month increase in burials in the city due to victims of enemy bombing and artillery shelling, the Pokhoronnoye Dolo trust until December 1941 coped satisfactorily with burials. True, there were difficulties in meeting the population's demand for coffins; because the carpentry and wreath workshop of the trust (due to its production capacity and in connection with the conscription of some male craftsmen to the Red Army) was not able to satisfy the rapidly growing demands of the population for this type of product.
The Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Council of Workers' Deputies, by decision of October 14, 1941 No. 697-s, ordered Lendrevbumtrest (managed by Comrade Shishalov) to organize the production of coffins at the trust's enterprises by October 20, 1941, ensuring the daily production of 200-250 coffins.
Lendrevbumtrest and its manager, Comrade Shishalov, underestimated the significance of the decision of the SZ executive committee on the production of coffins and systematically underproduced up to 100 coffins per day - this aggravated the situation with meeting the ever-increasing demand for coffins, and the decision of the SZ executive committee dated November 21, 1941 No. 810-s to the manager the trust reprimanded Comrade Shishalov for failure to comply with the decision of the SZ executive committee of October 14, 1941. But the 350 coffins [per day] produced by the Lenbumtrest enterprises and the workshops of the Funeral Business trust did not in any way satisfy the demand; in particular, demand increased in the first days of December, which forced the SZ executive committee by decision of December 14, 1941 No. 881-s to oblige the chairmen of the executive committees of district councils to organize the production of the simplest type of coffins at enterprises and in district workshops and produce them for sale to the population at least 15 pieces per day for each district.
The enemy blockade of the city, which continued from the second half of August 1941, and the lack of food supplies, forced the introduction in November 1941 of the so-called bread distribution rate for a worker's ration card of 250 and for an employee's ration card of 125 grams per person per day, provided that there were almost no other products was not issued.
This situation with the supply of bread and other products to the city’s population was not slow to affect the unprecedented increase in mortality.
In addition to the incessant enemy bombing and daily artillery shelling, which snatched dozens and hundreds of lives from the ranks of Leningraders heroically defending their beloved city, in December the terrible specter of famine loomed over the city and its population. Already at the beginning of December in the city, more and more often one could meet emaciated people, with swollen faces, swollen legs and a slow, unsteady gait, leaning on sticks when walking. There have often been cases where people different ages, often young men, without any visible external cause fell on pavements and panels and were unable to outside help rise. Some of them got up and trudged on, no longer reacting to anything around them - people, moving vehicles, artillery shelling, and some of them died right there on the street, and their corpses remained for some time lying here on the street, until a police representative with the help of street cleaners or other persons will not be removed into the courtyard of the house where they often lay long time, and then one by one or several at a time on sleds, trucks, cars [they were sent] to the nearest mortuary hospital, and at the end of December, when mortuary hospitals were overcrowded and refused to accept corpses, at night they were simply thrown to the nearest hospitals and clinics, to the streets and squares. Mortality among the city's population due to exhaustion from hunger, severe cold, and lack of firewood in December 1941 increased sharply and, according to incomplete data from the Funeral Business trust, reached 42,050 people, which in relation to the mortality rate in November 1941 was an increase of 247 %.
The apparatus of the Funeral Business trust, with its personnel from cemeteries and offices, turned out to be completely unprepared to carry out burial work on such an unprecedentedly large scale for the following reasons:
a) the volume of work on transporting corpses and burying them turned out to be unprecedentedly large, unexpectedly and unplanned falling to the lot of the trust;
b) the positions of deputy trust manager and head of the transport office were not staffed in the trust’s apparatus; Chief Engineer trust management Sadofiev, head of the cemetery operation office Piontkovsky and a number of other employees were out of action due to illness due to exhaustion;
c) gravediggers of cemeteries, of whom, until December 1, 1941, there were 109 people on the list - these are people who did a lot of physical work digging graves, ate and drank a lot of vodka and beer, finding themselves on a ration of 250 grams of bread, in early December, with the exception of units turned out to be sick due to exhaustion, unable to work, and 46 of them subsequently died;
d) the trust’s transport was not designed for the volume of transportation of corpses that had to be carried out in December;
e) the trenches prepared according to the MPVO plan in the fall, which were in no way designed for December mortality, were completely used in the first few days of December.
And the mortality rate among the city’s population increased every day; the trust’s transport not only completely refused to satisfy the population’s requests for transporting the dead from the city to cemeteries, but was far from coping with the removal of corpses from hospitals, clinics, evacuation centers and other places. The population's demand for coffins was far from being satisfied and could not be satisfied. The population was forced to resort to private methods of making coffins, which was taken advantage of by speculators and looters who demanded bread and other products from the customer, and people who were starving themselves but wanted to give last duty deceased to a loved one, for making a coffin they gave their last crumbs of bread or cards of the dead (see document No. 130), and those who did not have bread to pay for making a coffin either made a box themselves from doors, old boards, plywood, or simply sewed up the corpse of the deceased in a sheet, blanket (with a doll). This last method, as the easiest and simplest, was especially widely used. Only in isolated cases was the population able to use the transport of institutions and enterprises to transport the dead to cemeteries, and mostly the dead were transported on sleds, handcarts, strollers, on sheets of plywood, etc.
Many unique funeral processions moved around the city, and on the street highways leading directly to cemeteries (Smolensky Ave., Georgievskaya St., Novoderevenskaya St., lines 16-17 Vasilyevsky Island etc.), they represented a continuous line. They made a grave impression on the population of the city. In the thick haze of bitter frosts, shrouded human figures slowly and silently with string bags moved through the streets of the besieged, unconquered city, dragging behind them sleighs, plywood sheets with one or more dead people laid on them in homemade coffins, boxes, or sewn into blankets or sheets, and sometimes pushing in front of them a handcart with a dead man bouncing on it, or pushing in front of them a baby carriage with a dead man sewn into a blanket-sheet and seated in it. Hundreds of people, sleds, carts, cars, and baby strollers gathered in front of the entrances to the cemeteries.
The cemetery desks were packed with people. Here people were waiting for paperwork to be completed, looking for one of the cemetery workers to allocate a place for burial, but they did not find them, since there were very few of them, and even those were busy with mass trench burial. The so-called cemetery “wolves” crowded here with crowbars, shovels, axes and sledgehammers. These people, taking advantage of the misfortune of others, their powerlessness, the absence of regular gravediggers in cemeteries, for bread, cereals, tobacco, vodka, ration cards hired to dig graves, selling them ready-made, but since there was no supervision over their work from the administration of the cemeteries, and the citizens who delivered the deceased, tired and cold, could not always wait for the end of the burial of the dead, the “wolves” in some cases threw unburied dead , sometimes they dug out shallow graves, placed or laid a “doll” (a dead person sewn into a blanket or sheet), covered it with some earth or just snow and considered their job done. Citizens who brought a deceased person to the cemetery with good intentions - to dig a grave and bury them on their own - received a place or simply chose it themselves, began to dig a grave, but due to the fact that the ground was frozen to one to one and a half meters, [and] they did not have the necessary tool and physical strength, they dug a designated hole, covered it with a thin layer of earth or snow and left, and some simply, having tried to dig a grave (which was very difficult), threw the deceased into the cemetery and left.
From mid-December 1941, cemeteries, especially Serafimovskoye, Bolsheokhtinskoye and Volkovo, presented the following picture: In front of the gates of cemeteries right on the street, in the cemeteries themselves near offices, churches, on paths, in ditches, on graves and between dozens of them, and sometimes in hundreds, the dead lay abandoned in coffins and without them; Gradually, cemetery workers and those involved removed them and buried them in trenches, but the dead continued to be thrown up, and this spectacle remained until March.
In January and February, mortality increased, and people became even more physically weak from exhaustion, and in connection with this, individual burials and transportation of the dead to cemeteries by the population themselves decreased. Already in December, the transport of the Funeral Business trust clearly could not cope with the removal of the corpses of deceased people from hospitals, hospitals, evacuation centers and other places. By December 19, there were more than 7 thousand of them in the city. Back in the first ten days of December in the hospital named after. On the 25th anniversary of October, several hundred corpses lay openly in the report cards right in the courtyard and near the fence on the territory of the Trinity collective farm market. On this issue on December 19 at 5 o'clock. In the morning, a meeting was convened with the deputy head of the NKVD Directorate for the Leningrad Region, Comrade Ivanov, which was attended by me, the head of the Leningrad MPVO, Major General Comrade Lagutkin, the head of the City Health Department, Comrade Nikitsky, the head of the MPVO Department of the NKVD LO, Colonel Derevyanko, commander of the 4th of the NKVD regiment, Colonel Sidorov and the head of the Department of the Workers' and Peasants' Militia of Leningrad, Comrade Glushko. At the meeting, it was established that there were more than 7 thousand unremoved corpses in the city. The meeting decided to organize the urgent removal of corpses to cemeteries by vehicles of the city's MPVO, the 4th NKVD regiment, the police department and the Funeral Business trusts, and street cleaning. Hospitals, clinics, evacuation centers where there were corpses were distributed between these organizations, and in the morning, immediately after the meeting, work began. I, personally, straight from the meeting went to the “Funeral Business” trust and took into my own hands the organization and conduct of work on the removal of corpses, since there were not enough personnel in the trust’s apparatus, and one chief of staff of the MPVO trust, Kalistratov, was disabled (walked on crutches) , although he was conscientious about his work, he was not able to manage the work of transport. To transport the corpses, 3 five-ton vehicles of the 2nd motor depot of the street cleanup trust and 3 vehicles of the Funeral Business trust were brought in, and 50 people - MPVO fighters - were allocated to load the vehicles and unload the corpses. From December 19 to December 25 inclusive, 4,591 corpses were removed. If it was possible to clear the city somewhat of the pile of corpses, although not for a long time, then the situation in the cemeteries significantly worsened.
There were no free trenches in the cemeteries, there was nowhere to bury the corpses, and they were piled up in the cemeteries: Volkovo, Serafimovsky, Bogoslovsky, Bolsheokhtinsky and Dekabristov Island. The trenches prepared in the summer and autumn turned out to be already filled, and 270 workers, mobilized by the executive committees of the district councils, were at the disposal of the trust, according to the decision of the SZ executive committee of December 6, 1941 No. 852-s for digging trenches on the right bank of the Neva near Vesyoly Poselok, on Dekabristov Island and cemeteries: Volkovsky, Bolsheokhtinsky and Piskarevsky, they did not give positive results. They were sent to work carelessly, with large absences and did not produce any output.
The burial work carried out in the first half of December showed that its scale from the departmental framework of the Funeral Business trust grew into a citywide problem that could not be resolved without the direct participation of the executive committees of the district councils in this work, without the involvement of construction organizations with their mechanisms and MPVO formations. how physically healthy strength and as demolition specialists. On December 25, 1941, the NW Executive Committee adopted decision No. 57-s on the issue of streamlining the work of city cemeteries, in which it noted that city cemeteries were in clearly unsatisfactory condition. This decision removed manager Koshman from his job as he failed to ensure the normal functioning of the trust, and also outlined specific measures to streamline the work of cemeteries, namely:
a) the chairmen of district councils in whose areas cemeteries are located were asked to visit the full order in cemeteries, having completed the cleansing of morgues and the burial of all unburied corpses, sanitary standards for burial were established and the chairmen were warned that they would be personally responsible for the admission of unburied corpses into cemeteries in the future;
b) it was proposed to the head of the city police, Comrade Grushko: to prohibit the transportation of corpses around the city without coffins, establishing that all corpses should be handed over to district morgues, and from there transported in an organized manner to cemeteries; clear cemeteries of random gravediggers (speculators), bring the worst of them to criminal liability;
c) the chairmen of executive committees, district councils and UPKO were asked to restore order in the organization of the work of cemeteries and stop the population from destroying crosses and fences in cemeteries;
d) it was allowed to carry out mass burials in the following new areas: at Bolsheokhtinsky, Serafimovsky, Bogoslovsky and behind the Tatar cemeteries, on Dekabristov Island and near Vesyoly Poselok;
e) it was proposed that UPKO transfer the construction office of the green construction trust to the Funeral Business trust to carry out work on digging trenches;
e) the heads of the Housing and Construction Department were obliged to comrade. Drozdov and UKBS Comrade Kutin to allocate 4 fully serviceable excavators with the necessary personnel for digging trenches at the disposal of UPKO on a rental basis;
g) before December 28, 1941, the chairmen of the executive committees of the district councils were asked to organize district morgues for collecting corpses there, processing documents and transporting them to cemeteries for burial at the expense of the district councils;
h) in order to prevent the accumulation of corpses in hospitals and clinics, the city health department was asked to install minimum term registration of documents, and the UPKO, upon registration, transports corpses to cemeteries for burial within 24 hours. As a temporary measure, it was allowed to bury corpses from hospitals and clinics according to lists compiled by them, with subsequent registration through the registry office;
i) the staff of gravediggers in city cemeteries was increased to 200, the positions of deputy heads of cemeteries were introduced, the salary rates for senior cemetery employees were revised upward, and the rates for paying gravediggers for digging graves were increased.
The measures taken and carried out for a short period improved the matter of burials in city cemeteries, but since the number of dead people entering the cemeteries in January 1942 doubled one more time against December 1941, [these measures] turned out to be insufficient and did not ensure the timely burial of incoming corpses. The mortality rate grew steadily, and the population weakened from exhaustion; the entire burden of burial fell on the trust and executive committees of the district councils. If in December a significant portion of the dead were still transported to cemeteries by the population, then in January this decreased sharply. Accepted big sizes such a phenomenon when the dead began to be thrown en masse at hospitals, clinics, thrown onto stairs, into courtyards and even onto city streets. Organizations and enterprises transported the corpses of deceased people from the city and, fearing that the cemetery administration would not accept them due to lack of documents, dumped the corpses unnoticed by the guards in cemeteries or on the streets near them. On Kremenchugskaya Street at the outer doors of the mortuary hospital named after. Botkin, every day, abandoned dead bodies lay randomly in a heap. In addition, they could often be seen in the mornings thrown out to the gates of houses, on the stairs. When approaching the cemeteries, abandoned corpses of people were lying on the roads, in ditches, in the bushes; they could also be found in landfills, taken out along with garbage - this happened on the road running from the Bogoslovskoye cemetery to the Piskarevskaya road east of the 1st vegetable plant.
In January, again, unburied corpses accumulated in the city and in cemeteries, although by this time there was more order in the cemeteries, since the executive committees of the district councils were closely involved in the cemeteries and assigned responsible workers to supervise the work on them: a deputy was assigned to the Volkov cemetery. Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Moscow District Council Comrade Romanov, Dekabristov Island - deputy. the chairman of the executive committee of the Vasileostrovsky district, Karakozov, and the chairman of the executive committee, Comrade Kuskov, was involved in the cemetery on a daily basis; to Serafimovsky, the deputy. Chairman of the Primorsky District Executive Committee.
Since January 1942, the energetic engineer P.I. Chaikin came to the leadership of the Pokhoronnoye Delo trust, and Koshman, who was dismissed from work, was arrested and sentenced to 8 years in prison by the Military Tribunal for failure to take measures to prepare the required number of spare trenches and streamline the work cemeteries
In January, cases of cannibalism were identified in the city, and they gradually spread. The cemeteries were poorly guarded due to the lack of the required number of people and their employment at other jobs. Parts of corpses that were immediately cut up began to be stolen from cemeteries; a special predilection was shown for children’s corpses; corpses abandoned in the city were cut up and stolen, for example:
1. At the Jewish cemetery it was discovered that the severed head and feet were left in an open unburied coffin, and all other parts of the body were taken away.
2. At the Serafimovskoye cemetery, the head of the cemetery, Belyaevsky, and the local police inspector discovered an abandoned severed head of a deceased person; traces from the place where the head was found led to wooden houses located on the western outskirts of the cemetery, where it was discovered that the residents of the houses were engaged in cooking human meat.
3. The watchman of the Theological Cemetery, Comrade Samsonova, on the evening of March 1942, detained a citizen who was taking something out of the cemetery on a hand sled in a mattress cover, and upon inspection, five children’s corpses were found in a bag. The citizen was sent to the police.
4. On Kremenchugskaya Street not far from the deceased hospital named after. Botkin's body was discovered with severed soft parts of his body.
5. Skulls were found in cemeteries, from which brains [were] extracted...
Severed parts of the dead were often found left behind in cemeteries. Such body parts were often found, especially in the spring when the snow melted, in residential areas of the city and taken to cemeteries for burial. This situation forced police guards to be placed at all large cemeteries.
On January 15, 1942, the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council, by decision No. 34-s, in order to intensify the work of digging trenches for mass graves, ordered all chairmen of the executive committees of district councils to send 400 people to special sites by January 17, 1942, allowing them, if necessary, to transfer workers from the defense construction work. This decision was fully implemented only by the executive committee of the regional council of the Krasnogvardeisky district. He formed a special battalion led by Comrade Matyushin. The battalion carried out work at the Bolsheokhtinsky cemetery, digging trenches, burying and putting the trenches in order in the spring. Digging trenches at the Serafimovskoye cemetery and burial were entrusted to the headquarters of the city's MPVO, which carried out great job. The 40th NKVD Regiment was entrusted with carrying out demolition work, digging trenches and burial at the Piskarevskoye cemetery. Due to severe frosts exceeding -25°C and freezing of the ground by 1.5 meters, the executive committee allocated vodka to the headquarters of the MPVO, the 4th NKVD regiment and the Pokhoronnoye Delo trust to distribute to workers and soldiers working on digging trenches and burials.
Since the lack of the required number of trenches for mass burial was always a hindrance, and 4 excavators of the “Komsomolets” type, allocated by the decision of the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council on December 25, 1941, to the departments of housing and cultural and social construction, did not justify themselves in the work of digging trenches, the city committee The CPSU(b) and the Leningrad City Executive Committee ordered the 5th special construction department(Soyuzekskavatsiya), chief Comrade Chernyshev, who has powerful AK-type excavators and experienced qualified personnel, begin work on digging trenches at the Piskarevskoye cemetery. This department, headed by Comrade Chernyshev, began work and carried it out successfully. Piskaryovskoe cemetery, where Comrade Antonina Vladimirovna Valeryanova worked and currently works as a manager, as new, with significant land plot, was the main site for mass graves. Here, from December 16, 1941 to May 1, 1942, 129 trenches were dug and buried, not counting the military site. In this cemetery there are 6 trenches 4-5 meters deep, 6 meters wide and up to 180 meters long, which each accommodated more than 20 thousand corpses. According to unverifiable data, about 200 thousand dead were buried in this cemetery in just two and a half months, i.e. from January 1 to March 15, 1942, and in total from December 1941 to June 1, 1942 - 371 428.
The last days of January and February were the period when the number of burials reached highest point. A large number of corpses have again accumulated in hospitals, hospitals, evacuation centers and district morgues. Emergency measures were needed, and the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council, by decision of February 2, 1942 No. 72-s, obliged:
1. The chairmen of the executive committees of district councils, the UPKO and the head of the city's MPVO, Major General Lagutkin, within five days, remove corpses from district morgues, hospitals, hospitals and bury them in city cemeteries.
2. Allocate the following number of large trucks with trailers daily for the removal of corpses: ATUL - 10 vehicles, MPVO - 15 vehicles, UPKO - 5 vehicles, executive committees of district councils - at least 2 vehicles per day each.
3. The head of the city’s anti-aircraft defense, Major General Lagutkin, is to assign 100 anti-aircraft defense soldiers to the ATUL and UPKO vehicles for loading and unloading corpses.
4. Provided drivers of cars and workers transporting corpses with an additional 100 grams of bread, 50 grams of vodka or 100 grams of wine for every second and subsequent trips, and workers working to receive, send and bury corpses with an additional 100 grams of bread and 100 grams vodka or wine per day. This point of the decision of the executive committee on February 2, 1942 was approved by a resolution of the Military Council of the front.
5. Obliged Major General Lagutkin to allocate for daily work to the special site of the Dekabristov Island, to the Serafimovskoye and Bogoslovskoye cemeteries of the city’s air defense fighters, ensuring the complete burial of all incoming corpses.
The trust established standards for loading corpses on each vehicle depending on the tonnage, i.e., for a 5-ton vehicle - 100, for a 3-ton vehicle - 60, and for a 1.5-ton vehicle - 40 corpses.
The above decision of the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council dated February 2, 1942 successfully resolved the issue of removing corpses from the city to cemeteries, but did not resolve the issue of burial, since the required number of ready-made trenches was not available, despite the well-done work of the 5th OSU on digging trenches. Excavators worked around the clock in frosts that reached -30 degrees or more. Distinguished themselves at work: the excavator foremen, brothers TT. Galankins Nikolai Mikhailovich and, who did not leave work for several days and ensured that standards were met by 200%; head of the section Georgy Petrovich Ruchyevsky and deputy. chief engineer of the 5th OSU Gladkaya Alexandra Nikitichna, who, without going home for 2-3 days, did a lot of organizational work in severe frosts and ensured the timely start of work and their successful completion; senior site foreman Shchelokov Ivan Aleksandrovich, who supervised the work day and night and showed a lot of energy and perseverance in completing the special task.
It must be said frankly that the well-carried out excavation work of digging trenches by the 5th OSU basically solved the problem of burying human corpses.
For a significant number of days in February, 6-7 thousand corpses per day were brought to the Piskarevsky cemetery alone for burial. In connection with the additional progressive distribution of bread and vodka for the removal of corpses, vehicles were used very intensively. One could see 5-ton vehicles moving around the city, loaded with corpses of people one and a half times higher than the sides of the vehicle, poorly covered, and 5-6 workers sitting on top. The issue of removing corpses was resolved positively.
In addition to working excavators, about 4,000 people worked daily in the city’s cemeteries in February 1942. These were MPVO fighters who worked at the Serafimovsky, Bogoslovsky, Bolsheokhtinsky cemeteries and the special site of Dekabristov Island; soldiers of the 4th NKVD regiment, under the leadership of the very energetic and strong-willed Major Matveev, worked at the Piskarevskoye cemetery; workers and employees of factories, factories and institutions involved in work as part of their labor obligation. Special teams of the MPVO and the 4th NKVD regiment carried out demolition work, from which a cannonade of explosions thundered around the clock in cemeteries such as Serafimovskoye and Piskarevskoye. The rest of the soldiers, workers and employees, after the explosion, manually dug trenches, laid the dead in them, took the dead out of the coffins (since burial in coffins in trenches took up a lot of space, and there were not enough trenches), and buried the trenches filled with the dead. Despite such a scale of trench-digging work, there were still not enough of them. Urgent measures were needed to resolve the burial issue. Dig the required number of trenches in short term It was impossible, it was impossible to accumulate corpses in the city and in cemeteries.
On February 3, 1942, the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council decided to use the sand pit available at the Bogoslovskoye cemetery for a mass grave, which was filled with 60 thousand human corpses within 5-6 days. Bomb craters at the Bogoslovskoe cemetery, in which about 1,000 corpses were buried, were also used for burial. Later it was decided to use part of the anti-tank ditch for burial, located next to the sand quarry with north side, where more than 10 thousand dead were also buried. On the northern outskirts of the Serafimovsky cemetery, the existing 18 wolf pits, prepared as anti-tank obstacles, were used for burial, and about 15,000 corpses were buried in them. But the rate of arrival of corpses to cemeteries significantly outpaced the rapidly increasing pace of preparation of trenches, and therefore the measures taken to use quarries and wolf pits for burial did not eliminate the disproportion between the availability of ready-made trenches and the delivery of corpses to cemeteries. At the Piskarevskoye cemetery, the number of unburied corpses, stacked in piles up to 180-200 meters long and up to 2 meters high, due to the lack of trenches on some days in February, reached 20-25 thousand; At the Serafimovskoe cemetery it was filled with corpses, and some of them were simply lying in the cemetery. A pile of corpses of about 5 thousand lay at the Bolsheokhtinsky cemetery, and the morgue there was completely filled with corpses. At the Cemetery named after the Victims of January 9, about 3 thousand unburied corpses lay in a hay barn.
This situation in cemeteries lasted until the end of February 1942, i.e., until a turning point came when the flow of corpses for burial in cemeteries began, albeit slowly, due to a decrease in mortality in the city. The city of Kolpino is in an even worse position than the city of Leningrad in terms of burial, due to close proximity to positions Nazi troops. The Kolpino residents had the idea of cremating human corpses in thermal furnaces of the Izhora plant, and the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council of Workers' Deputies, by decision SZ dated February 27, 1942 No. 140-s, allowed the executive committee of the Kolpinsky District Council to burn human corpses in thermal furnaces. piles of human corpses in thermal ovens brought to mind the deputy chairman of the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council, Comrade Reshkin, who directly supervised the burial in the city and did a lot in this area, about the possibility of using the city’s enterprise for cremation of corpses. Such an enterprise was found - this is the 1st brick factory of the Industrial Administration building materials, located on Moskovskoye Shosse, 8, and on March 7, 1942, the North-West Executive Committee, by decision No. 157-s, obliged the head of the Construction Materials Industry Department, Comrade Vasiliev, to organize the burning of corpses at the 1st brick factory, putting into operation one of the plant’s tunnel kilns to March 10, 1942 and the second by March 20, 1942 with the appropriate adaptation of trolleys for cremation of corpses. Despite the resistance of old heating engineers, who argued that it was impossible to create the required temperatures in tunnel furnaces, the head of the department, Comrade Vasiliev Nikolai Matveevich, the chief engineer of the plant, Comrade Mazokhin Vasily Dmitrievich, the chief mechanic of the plant, Comrade Dubrovin Serafim Aleksandrovich, and a group of workers persistently and successfully carried out experiments And preparatory work and achieved positive results. In contrast to the crematorium that had been designed for decades, but was never built, on March 15, 1942, in Leningrad, at this plant, a crematorium unprecedented in history and throughout the world began operating, born of the thoughts of people working at the front, the besieged and difficult situation in which it was located at that time our town.
On March 16, 1942, the crematorium received and successfully cremated the first 150 corpses, and on March 29, it increased its capacity to 800 corpses; on April 18, 1942, it cremated 1,425 corpses per day, already working on 2 ovens. In April, a total of 22,861 corpses were cremated, in May 29,764 corpses, and a total of 109,925 were cremated before January 1, 1943. Firewood and oil shale are used as fuel.
The work of the crematorium for burning corpses greatly facilitated the burial process and made it possible at the end of March to eliminate deposits of unburied corpses in cemeteries, to bring the availability of ready-made trenches into line with the need for the burial of corpses arriving at cemeteries, and from June 1, 1942, thanks to the successful work of the crematorium and a significant reduction in mortality, we have completely stopped the mass burial of human corpses in cemeteries, and all corpses from hospitals, district morgues and other places are transported by the Funeral Business trust to the crematorium and cremated. From June 1 to the present, only individual burials are carried out in cemeteries.
Mass trench burial carried out in winter conditions with violations in a number of cemeteries sanitary rules As spring approached, they demanded:
a) carrying out urgent work to select, first of all, unburied corpses from cemeteries and rebury those incorrectly buried;
b) organizing and measuring the method of transporting corpses;
c) streamlining the work of district morgues, replacing some premises and adapting them all to receive corpses in the spring and summer;
d) clarifying the management structure of cemeteries, district morgues, their staff and rates;
e) establishing accounting and paperwork for corpses arriving at regional morgues.
On April 14, 1942, the SZ Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Council of Workers' Deputies adopted decision No. 206-s, in which it gave specific instructions for working in city cemeteries in the spring-summer period and eliminating violations committed during burial in winter conditions, and invited the management to develop and submit for approval staff and rates of district morgue workers, proposed to the head of the Leningrad MPVO, Major General Lagutkin, to form a special company of 300 people to ensure the loading and unloading of corpses, their burial and the elimination of shortcomings in burials carried out in winter conditions.
Spring and spring-summer warmth were approaching. The executive committee, management and trust "Funeral Business" were well aware that it was only possible to prevent the occurrence of epidemic diseases as a result of sanitary violations during burial in winter by carrying out large and urgent work in the city's cemeteries and in the city itself.
With the beginning of the snow melting in all cemeteries (especially many in Volkovsky, Bolsheokhtinsky, Serafimovsky and named after the Victims of January 9th), many coffins with unburied corpses melted from under the snow were discovered. Before the onset of heat and decomposition, they had to be removed, cremated or buried in existing trenches. By Order No. 29 of the Department of April 15, 1942, the manager of the Funeral Business trust was obliged to:
a) from the morning of April 16, 1942, organize work in all cemeteries in the city to remove corpses that have melted from under the snow and ice and immediately bury them;
b) to organize these works and manage them to large cemeteries to assist the manager, assign responsible employees of the trust management and the required number of vehicles;
c) complete the removal of corpses on April 18, 1942 and, at the same time, remove from the cemetery all coffins, blankets, shavings and other debris that could contribute to the occurrence of epidemic diseases.
During these three days, all the workers of the trust, headed by the manager Comrade Chaikin, cemetery workers, about a thousand factory workers and workers, mobilized by the executive committees of the district councils, collected 12,900 corpses - “snowdrops”, as they were then called, they were taken out of the coffins , loaded onto cars and sent to the crematorium, and if he could not accept it, to the Piskarevskoye cemetery for burial in the prepared trenches available there. The remaining coffins and other burial accessories were burned at bonfires in cemeteries. All day long, fires burned in the cemeteries, and continuous smoke rose from them.
If at the end of December 1941, in those difficult days, the executive committee allowed the possibility of burying corpses from hospitals and hospitals according to lists with subsequent registration of deaths in the registry office, which hospitals did not do, then from April 15 the management was strictly prohibited from trusts and cemeteries accepting corpses for burial without death certificates, this brought order to the matter of recording mortality.
Much in the district morgues that spontaneously arose and hastily organized in December 1941 were completely unsuitable for operation in spring-summer conditions (in the Oktyabrsky district, those delivered to the morgue at Kanonerskaya street, 33, in the Kirovsky district in the Volodarsky hospital, in Leninsky district on 12th Krasnoarmeyskaya street - corpses were directly piled up in the courtyards), they did not have approved staff and rates for workers, no forms for registering corpses were developed, no instructions, and each morgue worked in its own way and different organizations in the area obeyed.
On April 15, 1942, the management and trust, on the basis of paragraph 13 of the decision of the SZ executive committee of April 14, 1942 No. 206-s, was proposed by the district municipal department - Leninsky, Vasileostrovsky, Frunzensky, Krasnogvardeysky, Dzerzhinsky, Volodarsky, Oktyabrsky, Sverdlovsky, Primorsky - within three days select other premises for district morgues. The premises were selected mainly former churches, and until May 1, 1942, were adopted according to the acts by a special commission of representatives of the relevant district municipal departments, the police department, the district state sanitary inspectorate and the Funeral Business trust. The following location of district morgues was established:
1. Vasileostrovsky - VO, 8th line, no. 73
2. Volodarsky - Kladbischenskaya st., 4
3. Vyborgsky - st. Batenina, 5
4. Dzerzhinsky - Griboyedov Canal, 2 (church)
5. Kuibyshevsky - st. Mayakovskogo, 12
6. Krasnogvardeisky - Arsenalnaya st., no. 8
7. >> - Gunpowder, Elias Church
8. Leninsky - Red Commanders Ave. (Troitsky)
9. Moskovsky - Smolenskaya st., 11
10. Oktyabrsky - Kanonerskaya st., 3
11. Petrogradsky - emb. R. Karpovki, 2
12. Primorsky - Bolshaya Zelenina st., no. 9
13. Smolninsky - Aleksandro-Nevskaya ()
14. Sverdlovsk - (church)
15. Frunzensky - Ligovskaya st., 128 (church)
16. Kirovsky - st. Stachek, 54 (Volodarsky Hospital)
Strict sanitary control over the condition of morgues has been established, and regular disinfection of premises has been established.
By a decision of April 29, 1942, the executive committee approved the staffing and rates developed by the department for district morgue workers in the amount of 204 staff positions with a monthly salary fund of 64,600 rubles.
On May 18, 1942, the Department approved the instructions it had developed on the work of district morgues and all forms of recording their work.
In the spring and summer, corpses were to be removed from district morgues, their hospitals, and hospitals and cremated immediately. The Executive Committee assigned 25 vehicles from the motor transport department to the Funeral Business trust for regular removal of corpses, and ordered Major General Lagutkin to allocate one vehicle in each district at the disposal of district morgues for collecting corpses from the districts and delivering them to district morgues.
In April 1942, a special MPVO company of 200 people was formed to load and unload corpses on transport, and to carry out other urgent work in cemeteries. The company is housed in a separate room. The personnel of the company and district morgues are equipped with completely special clothing and footwear: impermeable overalls, rubber boots and gloves. Company soldiers and district morgue workers receive additional bread and vodka.
The reduction in mortality, the above measures, and the good operation of the crematorium ensured:
a) streamlining the work of district morgues and the opportunity for citizens and institutions that do not have the strength and means to bury the dead to hand them over to the district morgue;
b) the concentration of removal of the dead from all over the city in one hand - in the "Funeral Business" trust, the daily removal from hospitals, clinics and district morgues of all corpses to cemeteries for burial and to the crematorium for cremation, although on average 3316 were removed per day in April corpses.
There are no more deposits of unexported bodies in the city, and there are no more unburied corpses in the cemeteries. Only in certain places in the city were corpses discovered, the presence of which was discovered by chance. For example, after the Hermitage was evacuated, 109 corpses were discovered in the basements of its building. It was the Hermitage workers who died, and the administration put them in the basement and left them when they left without telling anyone.
In the winter of 1941/42, many individual burials were carried out in gross violation of sanitary standards, that is, at a depth from the surface of the earth of 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 35, 40, etc. centimeters instead of 80 centimeters.
By order of the administration, in the second half of April and the first half of May 1942, at all cemeteries in the city, their workers, under the guidance and control of employees of the trust management, examined all the graves of individual burials in the autumn-winter period of 1941/42 to identify graves where burial produced in violation of sanitary standards and subject to reburial. Based on the survey data, the order of reburials was established. The reburial of the dead was carried out by cemetery workers and workers recruited by district councils to work in cemeteries as labor, by deepening the graves and lowering the deceased, and in some cases the deceased was reburied right there in the cemetery in a trench. In total, during the spring-summer period, 9,173 individually buried dead were reburied in the city’s cemeteries.
The onset of spring-summer warmth and the beginning of the process of decomposition of the buried dead required daily strict monitoring of individual and mass graves from the administration, trust and cemetery workers, especially since a significant part of them was only lightly covered with earth. The embankments of individual and mass graves began to fail, corpses were exposed, and cadaverous smell. This threatened the emergence of epidemic diseases. The management and the trust urgently placed two Komsomolets type excavators to fill the mass graves at the Piskarevskoye cemetery, and people to fill the others: all cemetery workers, some personnel special companies of the MPVO and workers mobilized by district councils. First of all, all the mass graves were filled up with the formation of hills on them; during the summer, the mounds on some graves settled several times, they were filled up again each time. By the autumn of 1942, 17,850 individual and 584 mass graves were put in complete order with the design of gravestones. Only 78 mass graves at the Piskarevskoye cemetery did not have final grave mounds. The backfilling of the mass grave at the Bogoslovskoe cemetery (sand quarry) according to the decision of the North-Western Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Council dated June 17, 1942 No. 309-s was carried out using excavators by the Department of Cultural and Welfare Construction. The filling process lasted throughout the summer, since as the corpses decomposed, the filled earth settled. In total, 15 thousand cubic meters of earth were poured onto this mass grave, and the filling is far from finished. Particularly serious importance was attached to summer work at the cemetery in terms of daily monitoring of mass graves and maintaining them in order because similar to our experience mass graves history does not know. And therefore, individual specialists - sanitary doctors - agreed to the point that fountains of masses of decomposing bodies could fill fountains at individual mass graves. There were a lot of panicky conversations about this issue, but we, the workers of the Funeral Business, believed that we should only prevent the exposure of corpses when grave embankments fail, and the rest would go normally, and we turned out to be right. After such a mass burial, the city had no epidemic diseases.
Having experienced the very bitter experience of the lack of spare trenches for mass burial in the winter of 1941/42, and also taking into account the ongoing blockade, bombing and shelling of the city, at the request of the management of the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council, decision SZ dated June 14, 1942 No. 305-s allowed the trust to During the summer, carry out work on digging spare mass graves. This work was mainly carried out by the 5th OSU. Now every cemetery has spare mass graves, and in total different places 96 mass graves with a length of 6620 meters with a capacity for 134,120 dead.
In conclusion, it must be said that despite all the great shortcomings that occurred, mainly caused by the suddenness of the burial work on an unprecedented scale in history, a gigantic work was carried out.
Unfortunately, there is no organization in the city that could name the exact number of people who died in the city of Leningrad for the period from December 1, 1941 to June 1, 1942.
This is explained by the fact that, according to inaccurate data from burials made by cemeteries, the latter in December 1941 compared to November increased by 247%, in January 1942 compared to December - by more than 408%, in February compared to January - by more than 108%.
Not only was no one prepared for such magnitude of mortality and the lightning speed of its growth, but no one could ever even think about anything like that.
The executive committees of the district Councils of Workers' Deputies, the headquarters of the city MPVO with its divisions, some military units, and all of them were busy solving one main task - how to bury the dead and avoid their accumulation in the city. and in cemeteries unburied.
A small part of the population, enterprises and institutions went to the ZAKS authorities to register deaths, since at the beginning of the increase in mortality, the registry offices also turned out to be unprepared for registering such a large number of deaths - huge queues were created. In connection with this phenomenon, the further increase in mortality and the weakening of the living, the number of people wishing to register at the registry office [and] bury the deceased on their own fell, and the tossing of the dead increased, and their registration through the registry office was impossible. It was possible to count only in cemeteries, but even here workers were primarily occupied with quickly burying the large number of dead people arriving at cemeteries, and therefore, cemeteries, too, unfortunately, do not have an accurate record of those buried.
The scale of the burial work can be judged by the fact that from July 1, 1941 to July 1, 1942, in addition to individual burials, 662 mass graves with a length of 20,233 linear meters were occupied in the city cemeteries and newly designated areas, of which earth removed in conditions of severe frosts and soil freezing up to one and a half meters - 160,135 cubic meters. meters, not counting the sand quarry used for burial, the anti-tank ditch, bomb craters at the Bogoslovskoye cemetery and the wolf pits at Serafimovskoye.
According to the city's cemeteries, which are far from accurate and possibly overestimated, they buried 1,093,695 dead people during the period from July 1, 1941 to July 1, 1942.
The accompanying chart shows a huge increase in burials from December 1, 1941 to March 1, 1942, that is, a short time after the introduction of starvation rations for the city population, and the same sharp decline in burials began only in April 1942, although rations were increased at the end of December 1942. A sharp jump in the decrease in burials occurred in June 1942.
During the period from December 1, 1941 to December 1, 1942, 444,182 dead were transported by the transport of the city trust “Funeral Affairs” and by the transport of other organizations provided to the trust from civilian hospitals, hospitals, evacuation centers, district morgues and others.
When Comrade P.I. Chaikin came to work as manager of the Funeral Business trust in January 1942, he was able to somewhat strengthen the apparatus of the trust and cemeteries. Despite all the great shortcomings in the work of the trust and cemeteries, when carrying out this gigantic work, the trust apparatus (under the leadership of Comrade Chaikin, his deputy Comrade Tibanov) and the cemetery workers carried out a very large and unprecedentedly difficult work, and individual workers, guided by the fact that they were working in a besieged front city, they showed exceptional dedication to their work. For example:
1. Chief of Staff of the MPVO detachment, Comrade Kalistratov, disabled (without one leg), for more than two months - December, January and February - during these most difficult days of the blockade and the work of the burial trust, selflessly, malnourished, falling asleep for 2-3 hours per day, and sometimes less, without leaving home, he supervised the work of transport to transport the dead from the city to cemeteries. He often worked sick, with a fever. He realized that it was impossible to leave, since there was a lot of work, and there was no one to replace him.
2. Manager Piskarevsky cemetery Comrade Antonina Vladimirovna Valeryanova lived in the cemetery office for more than 3 months under difficult living conditions. At this cemetery, on some days, up to 700 workers were simultaneously working on digging trenches and burying; in February, up to 10,000 dead were brought in for burial per day. Antonina Vladimirovna was not at a loss, did not whine, but day and night she organized and supervised the work, in severe frosts, blizzards, during the day, late in the evening and at night, she could always be seen busy working in the cemetery or in the office. She actually showed herself to be a true patriot.
3. The head of the Serafimovsky cemetery, Comrade Belyaevsky Alexey Yakovlevich, came to this completely unfamiliar job on February 2, 1942, on this very difficult period blockade and the reversal of large burial works at this cemetery, quickly mastered the work, for more than two months without leaving the cemetery, living in difficult living conditions in the office, regardless of time and health, organized and carried out a huge amount of work, brought to the cemetery order. In the spring and summer, in order to prevent epidemic diseases, he reburied 2,910 individual graves and cleaned up 199 mass graves.
4. Spiridonov Ivan Alekseevich - head of the burial site on the right bank of the Neva near Vesyoly Poselok. In May 1942, having been sent to this new work for him by the executive committee of the Volodarsky District Council of Workers' Deputies, he correctly realized the importance of the work entrusted to him, quickly mastered it, put together a friendly team of cemetery personnel, regardless of time and effort, worked around the clock on the site and ensured uninterrupted burial. In the spring and summer, I did a lot of work digging spare mass graves and bringing the buried mass graves into exemplary condition.
5. Sidorov Pavel Mikhailovich - head of the Bolsheokhtinsky cemetery, a young comrade in age and administrative work experience. In this cemetery, one of the first, large individual and mass burials began in early December 1941. Almost all of the gravediggers fell ill, and Comrade Sidorov, having collected the remains of the cemetery workers, mostly women, arranged them correctly, understood himself correctly and conveyed the meaning to his subordinates work carried out by the cemetery during the blockade and together with the team of workers took up this work. He carried out a huge amount of work burying 127 mass graves. In the spring and summer, he put all the mass graves in order and reburied 2,594 individual graves. During December, January and February, almost without leaving the cemetery, he worked selflessly, regardless of time and health.
Guided high consciousness debt, in difficult conditions, regardless of severe frosts and malnutrition, the following cemetery workers worked well, giving all their strength:
At Volkov Cemetery
1. Kuzmina Anna Vasilievna
2. Lobanova Matrena Matveevna
3. Fedorova Maria Ivanovna
4. Kudryavtseva Pelageya Dmitrievna
5. Danilenko Sergey Semyonovich
6. Shishov Mikhail Nikitich
At the Bolsheokhtinskoe cemetery
1. Alekseev Andrey Alekseevich
2. Goryacheva Feodosia Kharitonovna
3. Egorova Ekaterina Ivanovna
4. Khmelinskaya Klavdiya Kuzminichna
5. Alekseeva Elena Nikitichna
Comrade Efimov worked until he was completely exhausted and, despite his lack of strength, went to work until last day life. On the last day of his life, he was at work, went home and, before reaching his apartment, died on the stairs of his house.
At the Bogoslovskoe Cemetery
1. Melenkova Maria Ivanovna
2. Samsonova Ksenia Nikiforovna
3. Melenkov Pavel Alexandrovich
4. Andryushov Alexey Alekseevich
5. Buzhinsky Viktor Ivanovich - worked until he completely lost strength and exhaustion, as a result of which he died.
At the Seraphimovsky cemetery
1. Filatova Natalya Vasilievna
2. Timofeeva Tatyana Grigorievna
3. Lavrova Fekla Isaevna
4. Petukhova Maria Alekseevna
Some cemetery workers, given the importance and urgency of the work being carried out, worked until last bit of strength. Some gravediggers, having dug out a grave with incredible effort, were unable to get out of it without outside help, or, lowering the deceased into the grave, fell after him themselves.
There were cases when the gravediggers of the Volkov cemetery Zuev, Novikov, Mitkin, Dmitriev and Kovshov died in the cemetery while at work. One of them dug a grave, lay down at the bottom to rest and never got up again - he died.
All this shows that cemetery workers, despite the difficulties, considered it their duty to their homeland to give all their strength and life for the work entrusted to them.
But the scale of the work was such that only the employees of the cemeteries and the trust apparatus could do this work without the help of the executive committees of the district councils, the headquarters of the MPVO, military units and it was impossible to carry out construction projects. The executive committees of the Krasnogvardeysky, Moskovsky, Vasileostrovsky, Volodarsky and Primorsky district councils played a significant role in streamlining the work of removing the dead from the city and burying them. They took direct control of the work of cemeteries and helped them on a daily basis labor force, tools and transport.
A very large amount of work in transporting the dead from the city to cemeteries, digging mass graves and burying them was carried out by MPVO units under the leadership of the MPVO [chief] Major General Lagutkin and Chief of Staff Major Tregubov.
From the general very large number The personnel of the MPVO units should especially note the good work of the following comrades:
1. Tipkin Georgy Ivanovich - head of the degassing team of the MPVO site. During the winter of 1941/42, he worked all the time digging trenches in harsh conditions at a frost of -30-35" C. He completed the work on time, for which he received gratitude from the head of the Leningrad MPVO.
2. Vasily Dmitrievich Zuev - fighter of the local MPVO formation. Throughout the winter of 1941/42 he worked on earthworks digging trenches, fulfilling the standards by 150-200%. Disciplined, dedicated fighter.
3. Petrov Nikolay Yakovlevich and
4. Alekseev Alexander Grigorievich - chiefs of staff of the MPVO of the Primorsky region - disciplined, energetic, strong-willed commanders. During the entire winter period of 1941/42, MPVO formations worked on digging trenches under their direct supervision. As a result, the district coped well with its assigned tasks.
5. Ustyantsev Ivan Nikolaevich - chief of staff of the MPVO of the Krasnogvardeysky district. During the winter of 1941/42, MPVO formations worked on earthworks to dig trenches under his leadership and with his direct participation. The district did an excellent job with the assigned work.
6. Medvedeva Maria Afanasyevna - commander of the demolition platoon of the 1st company of the headquarters of the Leningrad Air Defense Forces. During the winter of 1941/42, she worked on earthworks digging trenches. Comrade Medvedeva clearly and quickly carried out command assignments and set an example of courage to the soldiers of her platoon.
In incredibly difficult conditions, the workers of the city’s cemeteries great help The executive committees of the regional Soviets of Workers' Deputies, divisions of the MPVO and construction organizations carried out gigantic, unprecedented burial work during the year of war and blockade.
The result of the work was achieved well - the city and its population, having experienced unprecedented hardships, after such a mass burial in violation of sanitary standards, avoided epidemic diseases.
Head of the UPKO Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Council of Workers' Deputies A. Karpushenko
TsGA SPb., f.2076, op. 4, d. 63, l. 147-191.
The Stalin era was marked by massive repressions of the so-called “enemies of the people.” Many of them were sentenced to death. As a rule, relatives in these cases were informed that the person was sentenced to “ten years without the right to correspondence.” Those shot were buried in common graves. Such burials had the status of special objects. detailed information they appeared only in recent decades.
Kommunarka
In the 20s of the last century, a number of state farms and facilities subordinate to the security authorities appeared in the Leninsky district of the Moscow region. One of them was located in the village of Kommunarka, on the territory where, before the revolution, there was a manorial estate, and later - the dacha residence of the head of the Stalinist state security service, Genrikh Yagoda.
The special facility was an area of 20 hectares, fenced with a high fence with barbed wire. Beginning in 1937, the bodies of those executed in Lubyanka, Lefortovo, Butyrskaya and Sukhanovskaya prisons began to be brought here at night. There were rumors that an underground tunnel was specially dug from the investigative prison in Sukhanovka to Kommunarka in order to secretly deliver corpses to the special zone. According to one version, initially it was planned to bury in Kommunarka the OGPU employees who were on the execution lists. By the way, Yagoda himself was among them. But later the territory was adapted for the burial of other “enemies of the people” who were executed in Moscow prisons under the sentences of the “troikas”.
According to the FSB, about 10-14 thousand convicts are buried here, but the names of most of them are unknown; the identity of only about 5 thousand people was found out. Among them are writers Boris Pilnyak, Artem Vesely, Bruno Yasensky, members of the Mongolian government, leaders of the Comintern...
Butovo
Unlike Kommunarka, where mainly representatives of the “elite” were buried, the Butovo burial ground near the village of Butovo near Moscow, organized on the site of the former landowner estate Drozhzhino and operating since 1935, was originally intended for mere mortals. Most of the people buried here were peasants from the surrounding villages near Moscow, often arrested on far-fetched grounds, under the article “Counter-revolutionary agitation.” Sometimes entire families were shot to fulfill the terrible “plan.” Among those buried were also workers, employees and prisoners of Dmitlag (about a third of total number): scientists, clergy, sectarians, recidivist thieves. Another category is the disabled. Since blind, deaf and crippled people were rarely capable of physical labor, and therefore would have to waste prison gruel, they were simply sentenced to “capital punishment” after a formal medical examination.
According to documentary sources, it was established that from August 1937 to October 19, 1938, 20,765 executions were carried out on the territory of Butovo alone.
Levashovskaya wasteland
Today it is a memorial cemetery in the vicinity of St. Petersburg. From August 1937 to 1954, it was a special facility where mass burials of those executed were held: Leningraders, Novgorodians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and even foreigners - Poles, Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, Italians. In total, about 45 thousand people were buried in Levashovo during this period.
Today here you can see monuments to the repressed of each individual nationality. And also - monuments to representatives of various religious denominations and even repressed deaf and dumb people. The most famous objects of the memorial are the monument “Moloch of totalitarianism” and “Bell of Memory”.
Sandarmokh
This forest tract is located 20 kilometers from the Karelian city of Povenets. Those executed in 1934-1939 were buried in this territory. Their corpses were thrown into pits. A total of 236 such pits were subsequently discovered. It is estimated that about 3.5 thousand residents of Karelia, more than 4.5 thousand Belbaltlag prisoners and 1111 prisoners were buried in Sandarmokh Solovetsky camp special purpose.
Pivovaricha
In a forest tract near the village of Pivovarikha near Irkutsk in the early 1930s, the state farm “Pervoe Maya”, subordinate to the Irkutsk NKVD, was organized. Nearby there were dachas for NKVD employees and a pioneer camp for their children. In 1937, a special zone was set up inside the state farm territory, where they began to bury residents of Irkutsk and its environs who were executed by the “troika” verdicts. Sentences were usually carried out in Irkutsk, in the basements of the NKVD department on the street. Litvinova, 13, as well as in the internal prison of the NKVD (Str. Barrikad, 63). At night, the corpses were transported on trucks to Pivovarikha.
"Time will pass. The graves of the hated traitors will be overgrown with weeds and thistles, covered with the eternal contempt of the honest Soviet people, Total Soviet people". This is what state prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky said at the trial in the case of the anti-Soviet right-wing Trotskyist bloc in 1938. This is how he saw the future of the graves where the victims of terror lie. To the shame of his contemporaries, his words turned out to be prophetic in many ways. Although over the last decade the situation has changed in better side- hundreds of thousands of victims have been rehabilitated, Books of Memory and studies by historians on the problems of mass repressions are published in Moscow and in the regions, the Memorial Society and the public center "Peace, Progress, Human Rights" named after Andrei Sakharov have been created, commissions have been established to restore the rights of those rehabilitated, - The graves of those repressed are still covered with weeds and thistles, and they are trying to limit access to them.
The two largest mass graves of victims of political repression in Moscow are the special objects of the NKVD “Butovo” and “Kommunarka” (article about Butovo training ground see "Results" dated November 2, 1999). "Kommunarka" is located on the 24th kilometer of Kaluga Highway. Only more than sixty years later did it become possible to open it to the public.
"I'll give Berries to the security officers"
The name of the special facility was borrowed from the neighboring state farm "Kommunarka" (a former subsidiary farm of the OGPU), although residents of the surrounding villages call it "Vine". Perhaps the place was named after one of the owners of the estate, which was located here before the revolution. Sources indicate that once on the site of the special facility there was a Khoroshavka manor (a manor is an estate, unlike an ordinary estate, which does not generate income for the owner and is intended for recreation and entertainment). Khoroshavka is mentioned in archival records of the 17th century; it was sold many times, given as gifts, and passed on by inheritance. One of the books from the beginning of the century says that the manor was located “in a birch grove with a pond formed from the dammed Ordynka River” - this grove later became the site of a mass burial.
In the first post-revolutionary decades, the manor stood empty; the owners were evicted from there. According to the Central Archive of the FSB of Russia, in the late 20s - early 30s (the exact date is unknown), the territory was allocated for the construction of a personal dacha for the chairman of the OGPU, later the People's Commissar of the NKVD of the USSR, G. Yagoda. A new house was built on the site of the former manor's estate. Local residents recall that the dacha was guarded very strictly - it was not allowed to graze livestock near it, pick mushrooms, or even approach the fence. Yagoda's niece V. Znamenskaya says in her unpublished memoirs that the dacha was not intended for relaxation and family meetings; it was the country residence of the People's Commissar, where he held meetings with the leaders of the NKVD.
In April 1937, Yagoda was arrested, confiscated items were removed from the dacha, and it remained ownerless for some time. In the working notes of Yagoda’s successor, Yezhov, there is a laconic line: “I will give Yagoda to the security officers.” By then one firing range- Butovo - already worked in full force. But in 1937, the daily number of people executed began to number not in tens, but in hundreds, and it was necessary to open a new burial site.
The so-called execution lists compiled in the Central Archive of the FSB of the Russian Federation based on materials from archival investigative cases of victims of political repression include more than four and a half thousand names (according to preliminary data, at least 6 thousand people are buried in Kommunarka). The bulk of the executions - more than three and a half thousand - occurred in 1937, about a thousand were executed in 1938, 1939 and during the war years. In subsequent decades, they were all found innocent and posthumously rehabilitated. On the title pages of the execution lists it is said that the burial place of those executed is “territories in the village of Butovo or the Kommunarka state farm.”
It is very difficult to establish the exact burial place - this is due to incompleteness archival documents accompanying the execution of the sentence. There is reason to believe that, according to the plans of the organizers of the Great Terror, it was in Kommunarka that the bodies of especially responsible workers of the party and state should have been buried, although not a single source reports this. They were the ones who "passed" through central office The NKVD and through the most mobile “judicial body” for carrying out terror - the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. However, in addition to high-ranking people, Kommunarka also found simple people. The lists include an artisan shoemaker, a housewife, a carpenter at a metal toy factory, a general store agent, a policeman, a postman, etc. In addition to various “operational” considerations of the security officers, this is explained by the fact that the central apparatus helped to “unload” the Moscow NKVD department and took upon itself “ordinary” affairs.
Secret and obvious
In the land of "Kommunarka" are the ashes of members and candidate members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks: A. Bubnov, N. Bukharin, A. Rykov, Y. Rudzutak, N. Krestinsky; first secretaries of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of seven union republics; members of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, members of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, more than twenty secretaries of regional party committees, chairmen of the governments of union and autonomous republics, executive committees of regions and cities, founders and leaders of the Comintern (O. Pyatnitsky, Y. Berzin, Bela Kun). "Kommunarka" also became the main "general's" cemetery: many commanders of military districts and fleets are buried here (P. Dybenko, N. Kuibyshev, G. Kireev and others). The lists associated with Kommunarka contain more than two hundred names of NKVD employees executed in Moscow. In "Kommunarka" two of the most bright writer Soviet era- Boris Pilnyak and A. Vesely, scientist and poet A. Gastev, historian and literary critic D. Shakhovskoy, academician microbiologist G. Nadson, chief editors " Literary newspaper", "Red Star", "Truda", magazine "Ogonyok".
The sites of mass graves of victims of political terror were one of the most strictly guarded state secrets. In the past, only a few state security officials knew about them. Security guards at special facilities did not always know what they were guarding. In the years following the mass repressions, the MGB - KGB introduced a special position of curators of special execution facilities. As a rule, these especially proxies were with the rank of colonel, and their task was to ensure the safety of the territory and not allow outsiders there. In Kommunarka, the settled holes were filled up, for which purpose 50 trucks of earth were brought here in the 70s.
Nowadays the secret veils have been removed, but the historical reality is not revealed immediately. The collected information about the past of "Kommunarka" was first published in the newspaper of the "Memorial" society "October 30". Oral testimonies from many residents of the surrounding villages and towns have been recorded. Historian Arseny Roginsky studied in detail the so-called execution documents stored in the 7th fund of the Central Archive of the FSB of Russia. The results of this research formed the basis for the concept of the recently published Book of Memory of Victims of Political Repression “Firing Lists. Moscow, 1937 - 1941. “Kommunarka”, Butovo.”
The first, incomplete, examination of one of the mass grave sites in Kommunarka was carried out - the pits were counted, their measurements were taken, a search for traces of bullets in the trees was carried out, and access roads to the pits were determined. The execution zone was identified by the pieces of barbed wire remaining on the trees: after the last check, the condemned were brought here and shot at the edge of the pit.
The question of the future of declassified special objects and the creation of memorials there arose before the public back in the early 90s. The Moscow government allocated money for the creation of projects for memorials to victims of repression at the Butovo training ground and in Kommunarka. It was believed that the People's Commissar's dacha, burial sites and the entire territory should become a single museum complex. However, the projects were never implemented, and years later the Russian government decided to transfer the special facility - out of sight - to the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate. In 1999, Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov signed a corresponding order.
The Patriarchate transferred the former special facility to St. Catherine’s Monastery. “Kommunarka” became his courtyard; now several monks and a hieromonk live in Yagoda’s house. The experience of the Butovo site, also transferred to the church, showed that the church community is not involved in perpetuating memory and does not care about burials. The recent history of the St. Catherine’s Monastery does not give hope that the memory of those executed will be immortalized: on the territory of this monastery in Vidnoye one of the most terrible torture prisons of the NKVD was located, but the memory of those killed there is not immortalized.
In the meantime, access to Kommunarka is limited. In order to get there, you need to obtain special permission from the monastery. For example, the Kultura TV channel was never allowed to film there.
Leonid Novak - employee of the scientific and educational center "Memorial"
The cemetery has been in existence since the early 1870s. In the 1920s – 1940s, those executed and those who died in Leningrad prisons were secretly buried here. No identification marks were placed at the burial sites. The burials became known from eyewitness accounts. Total number those buried have not been identified, only individual names are known.
Park of Culture and Recreation named after Yuri Gagarin is a park of culture and recreation in the city of Samara. Opened on July 9, 1976. On the site of Yura Gagarin Park there used to be dachas that belonged to NKVD employees. This was back in the 1930s, when political repression was just beginning.
Butovo training ground is the historical name of the tract, known as one of the places of mass executions and burials of victims of Stalin’s repressions near the village of Drozhzhino, Leninsky district, Moscow region, where, according to the results of studies of archival investigative documents, tens of thousands of people were shot in the 1930-1950s. 20 thousand 762 people who were executed in August 1937 - October 1938 are known by name.
Contrary to modern insane apologists of Stalinism, the victims of the mass repressions of the 30s were not only the top of the Bolshevik elite, but also millions of absolutely apolitical fellow citizens, whose lives turned into those same Stalinist chips that rotted not only in the logging fields of the Gulag, described in detail by Solzhenitsyn, but also in places of mass terror at the place of residence. In every regional center At that time, at least thousands of people became victims of unprecedented government repression. For the execution of death sentences and hasty burials, remote places were specially allocated on the outskirts of cities away from human eyes. However, it was absolutely impossible to completely hide these “secret objects”, because the scale of the terror that took place against civilian population surpassed all imaginable boundaries.
Who were these people who were dealt with so cruelly? The photographs clearly show bullet holes on the turtles. They were often shot in the back of the head, and after that the opposite part of the skull gaped with a terrible torn hole. Many residents of the city, especially young people, no longer know that there were mass executions and burials on the territory of Arkhangelsk. There is practically no information about this anywhere, or it is in limited access.
We found her in 1988. But at first they did not give permission to visit her. At the last meeting of our commission, General Kurkov said: “Yes, you found what you were looking for.” And after the meeting we went there for the first time, they gave us a bus, the members of the commission went to Levashovo. And when they opened the gates and we entered there, it was a terrible state. And General Bleer walked with me, he was also a member of the commission. And I say: “What, is this here?” He: “Yes, it’s here. Your father is here." Here is my situation: 50 years later I saw and found out where he was buried, where I can bring candles, flowers, etc.
Butovo "raster" range
Butovo, as the village located on the Warsaw Highway used to be called, later the Drozhzhino manor estate located nearby began to be called Butovo, on the territory of which in the mid-20th century a special facility of the NKVD “Butovo training ground” was located.
In 1935, the area was about 2 square meters. km. was surrounded by a solid fence, an NKVD shooting range was equipped and the territory was taken under round-the-clock armed guard
The Butovo training ground was under the protection of state security troops until 1995. Then it was transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church
Scheme of the main burial sites of the historical monument "Butovo Polygon"
the blue longitudinal stripes in the diagram are not ponds, but ditches in which the bodies of those executed were dumped.
Worship cross at the Butovo training ground
Monument to victims of repression at the Butovo training ground
Funeral ditch at the site of mass graves at the Butovo site
Wooden Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at the Butovo training ground. The village of Drozhzhino, Leninsky district, Moscow region.
Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at the Butovo training ground (new).
Execution ground "Kommunarka".
Execution range "Kommunarka" - former dacha Chairman of the OGPU and People's Commissar of the NKVD Genrikh Yagoda, now a cemetery in the area of the village of Kommunarka on the 24th kilometer of Kaluga Highway in the Novomoskovsky administrative district of Moscow.
Since September 2, 1937, this special facility of the NKVD of the USSR became the site of mass extermination of various high-ranking figures. Those sentenced to death by the Military Collegium were executed here. Supreme Court THE USSR. The execution took place on the day of sentencing.
Initially, burial pits were dug with a shovel by one of the local residents, but soon the Komsomolets crawler excavator began to be used, which was used to dig long trenches. After the night executions, the bodies in the trenches were covered with a thin layer of earth by a bulldozer.
Executions were also carried out at the Kommunarka training ground foreign citizens. The list of victims includes political and public figures Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, leaders of the Comintern, representing the communist movements of Germany, Romania, France, Turkey, Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary.
The Mongolian government was destroyed here in its entirety on one day, July 10, 1941. A. Amar, who became the head of the government of Mongolia in 1936, was arrested in 1939 along with his 28 closest employees. All of them were taken to the USSR and on July 10, 1941 they were shot by the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR.
The Kommunarka training ground contains the ashes of 10 to 14 thousand people, of which less than 5 thousand are known by name.
Worship cross at the entrance to the Kommunarka training ground
Memorial obelisk to the government of Mongolia destroyed at the training ground at the Kommunarka training ground
Memorial obelisk to the buried Yakut residents at the Kommunarka training ground
Memorial cemetery "Levashovskaya Pustosh"
The Levashovskoe secret cemetery of the NKVD-KGB near St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) was used from August 1937 to 1954. for mass graves of people killed by security officers. Until 1989, the burial ground, surrounded by a high wooden fence, was secret object and was strictly guarded by KGB officers.
About 45 thousand victims of political repression are buried here
Memorial stele at the entrance to the territory of Levashovska Heath
Monument "Moloch of Totalitarianism" at the cemetery "Levashovskaya Pustosh"
Memory bell at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery
Memorial cross "Innocently killed victims of repression from the residents of the Novgorod region" at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery
Monument to the repressed Assyrians at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery
Monument to repressed Italians at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery
Memorial cross repressed Belarusians and Lithuanians at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery
Memorial cross repressed Lithuanians at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery
Monument to repressed Latvians at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery
Memorial cross to the Germans of Russia at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery
Monument to repressed Norwegians at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery
Monument to repressed Poles at the cemetery "Levashovskaya Pustosh"
Monument to repressed Ukrainians at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery
Monument to the repressed Finns - Ingrians at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery
Monument to repressed Estonians at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery
Monument to repressed deaf-mutes at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery
Worship cross to the executed nuns of the Goritsky Monastery ( Vologda Region) at the cemetery "Levashovskaya Pustosh"
Orthodox worship cross with the Image of the Savior "Eternal Memory" at the cemetery "Levashovskaya Pustosh"
Monument to repressed Lutherans at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery
Monument to the repressed Jews of Russia at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery
Monument to repressed Catholics at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery
Monument to Adventist Christians who were martyred for their religious beliefs during the years of Stalinist repression at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery. The names of those killed are inscribed on each stone.
Monument to repressed power engineers of "LENENERGO" at the cemetery "Levashovskaya Pustosh"
Monument to repressed power engineers at the Levashovskaya Pustosh cemetery
Memorial Complex in memory of the victims of political repression "Pivovarikha". The Pivovarikha tract is a forest in the vicinity of the village of Pivovarikha, Irkutsk region, Russia. In the early 1930s, the state farm “Pervoe Maya”, dachas for employees, and a pioneer camp for the children of employees, subordinate to the Irkutsk NKVD, were organized on this territory. In 1937, a special zone was allocated inside the territory for the burial of those executed.
By the decision of the NKVD troika in the Irkutsk region, 20,016 residents of Irkutsk and the Irkutsk region were sentenced to capital punishment. Most of The sentences were carried out in the regional center in the basements of the NKVD (13 Litvinova St.) and in the internal NKVD prison (63 Barrikad St.). At night, the corpses were transported on trucks to the forest near Pivovarikha and to the Bolshaya Razvodnaya area (now in the flood zone of the Irkutsk reservoir).
About 15 thousand people - victims of the Great Terror - are buried in Pivovarikha.
Entrance to the Pivovarikha Memorial Complex
The main monument of the Pivovarikha memorial
Monument at the mass grave in which the remains of those executed were reburied, extracted from ditch No. 1 in the Pivovarikha tract.
Signpost at the site of storage ditch No. 1 in the Pivovarikha tract
Signpost at the site of storage ditch No. 2 in the Pivovarikha tract
Signpost at the site of storage ditch No. 3 in the Pivovarikha tract
Signpost at the site of storage ditch No. 4 in the Pivovarikha tract
Wall of Sorrow in the Pivovarikha tract
Worship cross in the Pivovarikha tract
Tract "Sandarmokh" (Sandormokh).
The Sandarmokh tract is located 20 km from Povenets, Karelia. This is the site of mass graves of victims of political repression of 1934-1939. A total of 236 execution pits were discovered on the territory. 3.5 thousand residents of Karelia, more than 4.5 thousand prisoners of the White Sea-Baltic Canal and 1,111 prisoners of the Solovetsky special purpose camp were killed here. Mass executions began in Sandarmokh on August 11, 1937 and continued in the strictest secrecy for 14 months.
Monument to victims of repression in Sandarmokh
Memorial plate about 1111 executed prisoners of the Solovetsky prison in Sandarmokh
Memorial cross to Bishop Peter of Samara (N.N. Rudnev), shot in Sandarmokh
Memorial Catholic cross in Sandarmokh with the inscription "To the 60th anniversary / of Solovetsky Polish prisoners and priests who found a place of eternal rest on this land"
Cossack Cross in Sandarmokh "To the murdered sons of Ukraine"
Monument to the innocent murdered Chechens and Ingush in Sandarmokh
Monument to Russian Germans - victims of repression in Sandarmokh
Monument to the fallen Lithuanians in Sandarmokh
Monument to the dead Muslims in Sandarmokh
Monument to Jews shot in Sandarmokh
Monument to the Poles executed in Sandarmokh
Monument to Estonians executed in Sandarmokh
St. George's Chapel at the memorial cemetery for victims of repression in the Sandarmokh tract
“Execution camp” in Yagunovka.
"Execution camp" in the village. Yagunovsky (now a district of Kemerovo) - from October 1937 to May 1938, this was the place of executions and burials of victims of the “Great Terror”. According to eyewitnesses, those shot were buried in ditches, their clothes were burned (shots were heard, ditches were seen through the fence, pieces of burnt clothing were flying around the village).
Monument-chapel at the site of mass executions and burials in Yagunovka
Memorial square in Tomsk.
Executions in the basements of the internal prison of the OGPU-NKVD of Tomsk on the street. Lenin were produced from 1923 to 1944. After the prison was closed, the building was used as a departmental residential building for employees of the NKVD - MGB - KGB; in the 1950s, the fence was removed, and a city square was laid out in place of the yard. In the basement former prison There is a museum "Investigation Prison of the NKVD".
The building of the former internal prison of the OGPU - NKVD in Tomsk
Monument "Stone of Sorrow" in the memory park, Tomsk, Russia
Monument to Poles - victims of Stalinist repressions in the memory park, Tomsk, Russia
Monument to Latvians - victims of Stalin's repressions in the memory park, Tomsk, Russia
Monument to Estonians - victims of Stalinist repressions in the memory park, Tomsk, Russia
Memorial to the victims of political repressions of the 30-50s on the 12th kilometer of the Moscow highway in Yekaterinburg
The memorial is located twelve kilometers from Yekaterinburg. This is the site of a mass burial of 20 thousand Ural residents executed in 1937-1938. They were shot in the basements of the NKVD, brought here and thrown into ditches 45 m long, 4 m wide and 2 m deep. During the exhumation of one of the burial sites from one square meter The remains of the 31st person were recovered.
"12 kilometer", Ekaterinburg
Memorial cross "12 kilometer", Yekaterinburg
To the nameless dead in GULAG prisons and camps, "12 kilometer", Yekaterinburg
Religious stone, "12 kilometer", Ekaterinburg
Burial place of those shot and died in Orenburg prisons
in the 1920s - 1950s.
Monument to the victims of repression "To you, the great martyrs, innocently shot during the years of Stalinist repression and buried here - everlasting memory" in Orenburg (Zauralny Grove), Russia