Last night I did an impromptu poll on my Facebook. I have nominally more than 130,000 readers there, although I understand that no more than half of them are living people, and maybe even a third.
Nevertheless, in just one evening, five thousand people responded to me. I asked if the geographical name of KOLPASHEVO, TOMSK REGION, tells my readers anything. Or the name of a specific place - KOLPASHEVSKY YAR.
Colleagues at the Memorial assure me that Kolpashev’s story is widely known, described many times, and scattered all over the Internet. And in the 90s, a small book was even published on this topic.
However, out of 5,000 people who responded on my Facebook, only 30-40 people probably said that yes, they heard, they know what this name is connected with. Moreover, most of these people live (or used to live) in Tomsk and its environs, so they heard from relatives, from neighbors... The rest answered: no, I don’t know, I haven’t heard, I don’t know.
So now we can still tell this story.
The town of Kolpashevo (according to the latest census, a little more than 20,000 people) stands on the high bank of the Ob. The river makes a turn there, and every year “eats” several meters of a high sandy cliff, getting closer and closer to the outermost houses along Lenin and Dzerzhinsky streets. Everyone in the city has been accustomed to this from time immemorial.
In 1979 – right around May Day, April 30 – another two meters of sandy slope slid into the water. And from the vertical wall appeared the arms, legs, and heads of the people buried there. A multi-meter burial ground was exposed, in which people were stacked in dense stacks, in layers. In the upper layer the bodies were completely decayed, but in the lower ones they were very well preserved, mummified in clean sand. They say that one could easily see clothes, and in some cases even distinguish faces that were quite recognizable. There were men and women of different ages, and there were children. Everyone is in civilian clothes.
Several skulls from the top layer fell out of the slope; the boys picked them up, put them on sticks, and began running around the city, scaring passers-by. Soon the whole city knew what had happened. People began to gather towards the slope, someone even thought that he recognized someone’s coat, saw someone’s face... They cordoned off the police and vigilantes. Then very quickly - literally in a few hours - they built a blank fence around the crumbling slope.
The next day, party meetings were held around the city at various enterprises and in red corners. Party agitators began to explain to the population what they were told by the district committee: this was the burial place of traitors and deserters from the war. Somehow it turned out unconvincing: why in civilian clothes? Why women and children? And in general, where do so many deserters come from in a city with a population of 20 thousand?
Meanwhile, a little more sand fell and it became clear that the burial ground was huge. Thousands of people.
The city remembered that there was a prison on this site in the late 30s. In general, it was known that they were shooting there. But no one could imagine how much. The fence and barbed wire were demolished long ago, the prison itself was closed long ago, even the log house was moved to another place, away from the crumbling shore; there was a technical school dormitory there for many years.
In fact (few people in the city knew about this), a full-fledged death conveyor was set up in the Kolpashevo prison: they built a special plank chute along which a person himself went down to the edge of the ditch, where he was killed with a rifle by a shooter sitting in a special booth, if necessary they were finished off with a second shot from a pistol, laid in the next layer, jack with the previous corpse, and lightly sprinkled with lime. And so on until the pit is filled. Then it was filled with sand, and the chute was moved several meters to the side.
So, the bank continued to crumble, and several corpses fell into the water and floated along the river along the entire city. People from the shore watched.
In Tomsk, it was decided to get rid of the burial ground and remove the corpses. The decision was made personally by the then First Secretary of the regional committee, Yegor Kuzmich Ligachev. He consulted with Moscow, directly with KGB Chairman Andropov. The Kolpashevo authorities were ordered to destroy the burial ground and rebury the corpses in another place.
But it turned out that this was not easy to do: it was impossible to drive the equipment too close to the crumbling sand cliff. They feared for the safety of trucks and excavators. But there was no time to dig by hand: the authorities urged it.
By that time, the scale of the giant burial ground was already clear. A drilling rig (again, slowly: a drilling rig) was towed ashore and drilled several holes to determine the contours of the burial site.
Then a new order came from Tomsk containing an interesting, ingenious engineering solution. Along the Ob, two powerful tugboats were driven close to the sandy cliff, tied with cables to the shore, their sterns to the slope, and the engines were turned on at full power. The jet from the propellers began to erode the shore, corpses fell into the water, most of them were immediately cut into pieces by the same propellers. The tugboat crew was ordinary, civilian. No one selected him or replaced him specifically for such an occasion.
Residents of Kolpashev watched the operation with interest. Nobody protested.
Then it turned out that some corpses still floated downstream without falling under the propellers. The mummified bodies floated well in the water and did not sink. Then a cordon of motor boats was set up across the river, in which people with hooks were sitting: their task was to catch corpses in the water. These people were vigilantes, they were recruited from local men - workers, office workers, and the working intelligentsia. A barge loaded with scrap metal from a nearby factory was brought up to the boats. It was necessary to tie unnecessary pieces of iron to the caught corpses with wire and immediately drown them in the deep part of the fairway. This work continued for several days.
Residents of Kolpashev continued to watch the tugboats thrashing their propellers through the water. Diesel fuel was regularly delivered to the tugs: a total of 60 tons were spent on each one. No one was particularly surprised or indignant.
The last team - also from local vigilantes - worked even further downstream: people in motorboats drove around the banks and collected those corpses that the upper boatmen with scrap metal had missed. They were sometimes buried (unmarked) on the shore, but more often they were drowned in the river, cut into pieces with oars or tied with stones for weight. This collection continued almost until the end of summer.
The city spent this summer, in general, calmly. As always.
That, in fact, is the whole story.
If anyone doesn’t understand, I’ll say straight out what seems remarkable to me about these events. This is a story not about Stalin’s repressions, not about the Great Terror, not about the NKVD, not about the state machine of destruction.
This is a story about a Soviet man. About our fellow citizens, countrymen, brothers and sisters. About the Siberian character. About the moral code of the builder of communism.
About the largest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. About the great and beautiful country that we have lost, and about which if anyone does not regret, then he has no heart.
And one last thing.
Egor Kuzmich Ligachev in 1983, 4 years after Kolpashev, went to Moscow for a promotion: at the suggestion of Yu.V. Andropov, he was appointed head of the department of the CPSU Central Committee. Yegor Kuzmich is alive, until 2010 he was active, tried to participate in the life of his native party. A big fan of Gumilyov's poems.
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov himself in 1982, 3 years after Kolpashev, became the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. He conceived reforms, but never implemented them. He wrote poetry, they say he loved jazz and American films. He died surrounded by loyal companions and loving household members.
On the banks of the Ob, directly opposite Lenin Street in the center of Kolpashev, a long triangular gulley in the sandy slope still remains. For some reason the river doesn’t wash it away.
Sergei Parkhomenko’s post about Kolpashevsky Yar is being actively discussed online. Although I had read a lot about the period of Stalinist repressions and was generally seriously interested in this period, I learned about this terrible story for the first time. It is very symbolic (this is discussed below in the text of the encyclopedic article): the secret of the terrible crimes was revealed from April 30 to May 1, 1979 - on the eve of the May Day demonstration and, according to old beliefs, on the night of “devilishness.” This discovery entailed a new crime - a savage, bestial attitude towards human remains, a clash between the declared and true morality of the supreme Soviet power and its local support in the era of “stagnation”.
There seems to be a certain symbolic meaning to the repeated mass appeal to this topic today.
General description
Every year the Ob River washes away about 15 meters of the Kolpashevo bank. In the place where the river bed is now located, houses once stood. The Ob has changed its high right bank beyond recognition. Back at the beginning of the 20th century, it sloped gently down to the water, to the pier; now it can only be seen like this in the area of the new, relocated city pier. Kolpashevo Yar is a completely sheer cliff the height of a five-story building. From time to time, part of the shore is washed away by water and it falls down. More often this happens at the end of spring or at the beginning of summer, when the water level in the Ob noticeably rises, and especially on those days when the south wind drives strong waves. In recent years, Kolpashevo residents living next to this cliff have been anxiously awaiting the onset of spring. If the Ob continues its attack on Kolpashevo at the same speed, then in the coming years Dzerzhinsky and Narymskaya streets will completely disappear from the city map. Taking away several meters of land from the coast every year, the cliff causes a lot of trouble. Almost every year we have to resettle families from the collapse zone.
Kolpashevo Yar is of considerable interest to archaeologists. Repeatedly after the collapse, the remains of prehistoric animals were found here: mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses and other prehistoric artifacts.
The place gained worldwide fame after, on the night of April 30 to May 1, 1979, the slope of the ravine, washed away by spring waters (part of Dzerzhinsky Street), collapsed into the Ob River and uncovered several mass graves of people who were shot and otherwise died in the local department for the special Narym district of the NKVD Siblag in the 1930s.
See also: Siblag article
Event
On the evening of April 30, 1979, as a result of another landslide (collapse of a high bank) on Dzerzhinsky Street (near the exit to the shore in this place of the city’s central Lenin Street), a layered mass grave of people was opened. A terrible picture opened up from the river. Human remains protruded from the cliff, starting from about two meters deep: arms, legs, heads. The opened section of the burial measured up to four meters wide and up to three meters deep. The corpses in the grave were stacked in piles, and while the upper ones were completely decayed, the lower ones were preserved extremely well, even by their faces it was possible to identify the dead. Or rather, killed. There were bullet holes in the back of the skulls of almost all skulls. Many skulls had two of them, with the second bullet hole in the temporal bone of the head.
The event happened very inopportunely. The country is at the peak of the era of “developed socialism”, the rehabilitation of Stalinism (with portraits of the “Leader” on the windshields of cars and buses in cities and villages), and, most importantly, the completion of preparations for the widespread celebration of the year’s main ideological holiday of all communists “1- e May”, for which both the city of Kolpashevo and the Kolpashevo district separately, as well as the entire Tomsk region, and the entire Soviet country as a whole, are preparing. All power, all party functionaries are involved in ensuring the event - it is necessary to quickly put together and design, decorate a platform for the leaders of the city and region, from which they should welcome the festive demonstration of the workers - in a single burst of joy, united communists and non-party people should march in colorful columns of workers local businesses and government agencies.
The boy's burial was the first to be discovered. Boys are always far from ideologies and sometimes do not understand issues of morality. They always and everywhere play, and if the games surprise others, it is much more interesting. The mass burial ground did not frighten them, but rather attracted them. Skulls were taken from the skeletons (the top layer of corpses had decomposed over several decades) and first thrown into the waters of the Ob. Then, putting the skulls on sticks, they ran around the city with them in order to scare the girls. They knocked these skulls on the windows of the second floors of the school - the effect of the squeals was stronger.
The news of the discovery of hundreds of dead instantly spreads throughout the small town and many townspeople came here with flowers and funeral candles, the place and time of the event became an unexpected wake. Voices were heard reburying people and a mass grave opening up. The reburial, with an examination of each of the dead, threatened to become a grandiose event. A lot of people gathered on the shore: both curious people and those who remembered what happened at this place in 1937 came here.
Here, at the very beginning of Lenin Street near the elevated bank of the Ob, a special commandant’s office of the OGPU appeared in the late 1920s, and then an NKVD town was built. The Narym district special commandant's office kept records and monitored the serving of sentences of exiled special settlers - since 1928, an unprecedented de-peasantization (liquidation of the peasantry as a class) began in the grain-growing regions of Southern Siberia on the personal order of I.V. Stalin and thousands of peasant families were resettled by the OGPU “from Siberia to Siberia” - to the northern, harsh Narym and Turukhansk regions. The majority continued to be here, since the terms of exile in the 1930s - 1940s were extended several times. Industrial facilities, administrative buildings, and residential buildings were built by the hands of exiles in Kolpashevo. Some of them, along with peasant huts of the last century, have survived in the city to this day. From 1933-1934 The regime of repression in the country has become more severe. New concentration camps and camp centers of the GULAG system of the USSR were urgently built, and Siblag appeared on the territory of Western Siberia and part of modern Kazakhstan. The central building of the Kolpashevo OGPU (later NKVD) was two-story, made of timber, facing Dzerzhinsky Street (exit to the panorama of the Ob River). There was a front porch here. From the building to the slope of the shore (coastal ravine) there was at least 150 meters. This space was enclosed by a fence 3 meters high, which created a camp point with a square of 150x150 m around the perimeter close to the building of the Narym Okrotdepartment of the NKVD. Three watchtowers rose above the fence, along the top of which were several lines of barbed wire. The town complex also included a prison building, consisting of 6 cells in which those arrested and sentenced to death were kept. It was located near the central building of the Okrotdepartment. In one of the prison cells the execution sentences of the “twos”, “troikas” and the Special Meeting were carried out. The gates leading onto Dzerzhinsky Street were always locked. And rarely did anyone come inside through the doors of the front porch during the daytime. The majority of Kolpashevo old-timers remembered the NKVD building as silent and gloomy. Later, due to erosion of the coast, this building was moved to Gorky Street. Slightly rebuilt, covered with planks, it served for a long time as a dormitory for the local medical school. As it turned out, on the territory of the camp a large hole was dug for a mass grave, in which the bodies of those who were shot and otherwise died of those repressed in this house were anonymously piled. The bodies were stacked tightly in a layer, which was covered with lime from decomposition; the bodies of a new layer were again laid across this layer. According to the Tomsk Memorial Society, the total number of people shot and buried here during the Great Terror is about 4,000 people...
According to the testimony of a former NKVD/KGB employee, Anatoly Ivanovich Spragovsky, 99% of investigative cases against convicts were grossly falsified by employees of the Tomsk and Narym departments of the NKVD. Mass repressions were also forced by the target numbers of exposure and neutralization sent down from above. Many of them were presented with trumped-up charges of belonging to the mythical Socialist-Revolutionary-monarchist organization. The executions were clearly of a group nature - as was actually the case in the late 30s. Boardwalks were built (they were also called “boxes”). The dimensions of each such “box” were 3-4 meters in length, 2-3 meters in width and a little more than a meter vertically. Usually 40-50 people arrived at the prison in stages. After the sentences were carried out, the corpses were tightly packed in a “jack” and sprinkled with lime (for disinfection and so as not to be buried again before the arrival of the next batch) in holes dug in the yard. Subsequently, in 1938, when the flow of convicts increased sharply, those executed began to be buried under the flooring of the cell. The pits with corpses, as the instructions stated, were compared to the ground and were not marked by anything. In some “boxes” clothes were collected separately. The fact that she did not end up in a store through which requisitioned items were sold (a similar store existed in Kolpashevo) may indicate that local residents were among those destroyed, and the NKVD authorities took care to avoid any leakage of information.
(From an article by N. D. Sitnikova)
In the afternoon, city and district (communist and executive) authorities emerge from their initial stupor. City Manager Comrade Shutov acted clearly, in a Bolshevik manner. Soldiers from the construction battalion were urgently dispatched to the site and are enclosing the newly discovered burial site with a fence. Vigilantes (activists from party committees and Komsomol committees of enterprises and institutions) were also sent here, who organized a vigil at the mass grave and on the approaches to it, not allowing people to even glance at those who died during the years of Stalinism. The police squad, reinforced by vigilantes, remained here all night and the entire next holiday day. It’s one thing to drive away simply curious people and young people who have been stirred up by an extraordinary event in the town. Another thing is to prevent people who believe that their relative died here from discovering corpses. ...The relatives of those who disappeared without a trace in the dungeons of the Kolpashevo NKVD walked to the open grave. Children and wives, brothers and sisters. It seemed to many of them that among the piled corpses they would certainly recognize their loved ones by their clothes. One elderly woman recognized the face of her husband, who had been taken away from home at night 40 years earlier (in 1938), and it was impossible to convince her of the mistake. There might not have been a mistake... Most of the bodies were mummified, which can be explained by the ventilation process occurring in the sand. In the grave they saw peasant bast shoes, children's shoes, and the corpses of women and children. Many of the corpses were in almost perfect condition, some of them were mummified due to the combination of soil and lime with which the corpses were covered in the pit where they were stored after execution. Most of the clothing was preserved on the corpses; moreover, it was possible to identify the corpses by external signs, by facial features. Rumors filled Kolpashevo. City authorities had to give the first clarifications. And the explanations boiled down to the statement that deserters shot during the war were allegedly buried here.
The incident was reported to the Tomsk Regional Committee of the CPSU and to the relevant authorities. Head of the city department of the KGB of the USSR for Kolpashevo and Kolpashesky district, comrade. Kopeikin reported on the politically dangerous incident to the head of the KGB department for the Tomsk region, Comrade. Ivanov K. M.
There were no attempts to undertake a forensic medical examination of the corpses (and the lower layers were preserved “like new, like yesterday”); the local authorities decided to wait for special orders from higher authorities. The authorities focused the attention of all leaders of the party-Komsomol and Soviet district-city apparatus, heads of industrial enterprises, local industrial enterprises, city institutions, transport, communications and military units on holding the May Day holiday and distracting citizens from the opened mass grave.
After the May Day demonstration, the first secretary of the Tomsk regional committee of the CPSU, Yu. K. Ligachev, and the head of the KGB department for the Tomsk region, Colonel K.M. Ivanov informed the responsible officials of the CPSU Central Committee and the KGB of the USSR (in particular, members of the Politburo, secretaries of the CPSU Central Committee M.A. Suslov and Yu.V. Andropov) about the discovered burial. There, a decision was made to prevent publicity, for the purpose of which it was ordered to destroy both the remains and signs of this and other similar Kolpashevo burials. At a meeting in Tomsk, they decided to remove the grave from the water, wash away the shore with the flow from the propellers of the ships, and the remains of the corpses would be drowned in the river. The operation to destroy the burial place was carried out by members of the USSR KGB units. The head of the regional department of state security, K. M. Ivanov, and the secretary of the regional committee of the CPSU, A. I. Bortnikov, personally arrived at the site of the discovery of the burial in the city of Kolpashevo. KGB Major General A.I. Fokin arrived from Moscow. Under their direct leadership, a cover-up operation was carried out. At the same time, the area of the mass grave was cordoned off by soldiers of the arriving units of the USSR KGB troops.
Covering up a crime
The Kolpashevo city prosecutor and the head of the police department were instructed not to carry out any inspections to examine the corpses from this burial; they were informed that the burial of the corpses would be done without conducting a forensic medical examination at the discovery site. Party leader A.I. Bortnikov collected the party and economic assets of the city and reported that it should be assumed that the exposed burial place contained deserters shot during the war. They were shot according to martial law. Conversations that the townspeople saw the corpses of people who were clearly not liable for military service (women, disabled people, old people, children) are declared to be disinformation and anti-Soviet propaganda, the machinations of enemies. However, after the Khrushchev thaw and the democratization of Soviet society that took place, this ban on information did not last long. Public opinion in Tomsk and the Tomsk region already in the 1980s negatively assessed the fact of concealing crimes by the party leaders of the region.
On May 3, the burial site was surrounded by a high fence with the inscription “Sanitary zone”. Security appeared near the zone to prevent people from bringing flowers and lighting candles. Of course, no one really thought about the issue of reburying the remains, as demanded by the local population. They told him, this population: Here’s more! We will rebury the enemies of the people here...
(See N. D. Sitnikova)
At first, an attempt was made to excavate the grave from above, from the shore, and to remove the remains of those shot in cars. But this was soon abandoned due to the complex configuration of the burial site and the danger of ravine collapses. We decided to operate from the river. This action became a continuous two-week, round-the-clock war between the living and the dead. To erode the shore, the KGB officers brought in two river ships - the most powerful two-thousand-ton tugs of the OT series. First, one motor ship, secured with steel cables to the coastal structures, turned its screws towards the ravine and the grave, and began at full power to create a stream of water, eroding the slope. Then a second motor ship was also involved. But the shore did not give in well, and there were also problems with the corpses. Some of them, as the organizers of the special operation had hoped, were chopped and crushed by the propellers of the ships. But most of the corpses began to be spread throughout the river. The work of the ship's propellers undermined a ravine about forty meters high. When the bank collapsed, two more mass grave pits were discovered. One contained human remains, the other contained preserved mummified corpses. As the bank eroded, remains and mummified corpses began to fall into the river. The cover-up operation cost the state a pretty penny. Only one of the ships burned 60 tons of fuel. Plus drilling wells on the shore, construction battalion, police, water rescue service. Plus other associated costs... Truly, a simple reburial would cause much less expense to the budget and costs of the country.
One of the ship captains says: “The corpses from the pits began to fall into the water. The frozen top layer of the earth collapsed in large blocks as the lower thawed layer of soil was washed away. There were a lot of holes. The corpses were intact, of different sizes... At that time, they were drilling wells on the shore, looking for undiscovered burials... I was afraid.” And here are the words of one of the first mates: “The engines overheated, we were cut off (the cable broke), we retreated several times. They explained to us that this was a sanitary measure. They told us not to talk about it. ... Boats were working downstream, catching those who swam away and who were not crushed by the propellers.”
(Ibid.)
Specially organized teams of GOVD policemen, under the leadership of KGB officers, were on duty at the ships in several motor boats; they caught undrowned corpses with wire loops, tied the cargo, took them to the river fairway and drowned them... Those who persisted and did not go to the bottom were chopped into pieces oars and tied metal weights to them again. Day after day, night after night.
During the special operation, some of the corpses were spread over a long distance along the banks of the Ob River. Until September, KGB officers downstream carried out regular surveys of the banks of the main and flowing channels of the Ob. When corpses and remains were discovered, without conducting a forensic medical examination, they were buried without marking the place - basically, drowning in the fairway.
Over the years, in 1979, the Soviet authorities closed the criminal case; they did not begin to search for those responsible for the mass repressions, with their subsequent prosecution. They did not initiate an investigation even after the fall of communist power, in the 1990s and later, into the fact of concealing traces of the crime.
File:Kolpashevo Yar book.jpg
Book "Kolpashevo Yar"
Some consequences
What happened, despite the efforts of the party and ideological forces of the region to keep the information confidential, nevertheless stirred up the public of the Tomsk region. The fact of concealing the crime scene was one of the strongest blows to the image, to the ideological strength of the CPSU and, in fact, became one of the main reasons for the fall of communist power in 1989 in the Tomsk region. At the same time, both then and now, the most odious radicals from among the newly-minted revolutionaries threw the main accusation of “erosion of Kolpashevo Yar” at the party leader of the region E.K. Ligachev. After all, in order to become bright and significant, you need to attack the brightest and most authoritative personalities of the other side, especially if the radical does not have any deeds or achievements of his own. However, as history shows, Ligachev’s role in this event was not the main and decisive one. All issues were resolved in Moscow, in the ideological department of the CPSU Central Committee, and the decisions made there were then implemented by the forces and means of the national security system, by the KGB of the USSR.
In 1989, V. Zapetsky’s book was published and the country’s press was aroused by discussions. The ruling party tried to change the emphasis and reduce the essence of what happened. Article by the First Secretary of the Tomsk Regional Committee of the CPSU V.I. Zorkaltseva, published in the main newspaper of the country “Pravda” on July 16, 1989, tried to veil the events of 1979 and shift responsibility to the Kolchakism, bandits, deserters and the raging river.
With the beginning of the 2000s and with the trends towards neo-Stalinism and nostalgia for the 1930s, the topic of Kolpashevo Yar was again consigned to oblivion at the official level. Only the public, in particular the regional branch of the Memorial Society, does not forget her. In 1990, a criminal case was opened into the violation of the bodies of the dead in 1979. But since the same “establishment” from the old party nomenklatura of the CPSU continued to operate in the country, they successfully closed the case in 1992 for lack of corpus delicti. No more investigations are being initiated either into the camp, or into the Narym district department of the Western Sibkrai/Novosibirsk region of the RSFSR, or into the conduct of the blasphemous special operation in May 1979. Moreover, in 2013, a festival was even organized near this place in honor of the Narym Museum, created in memory of the imprisonment here in Narym in the summer of 1912, 41 days, of the exiled I. V. Dzhugashvili (Stalin): Stalinism and leaderism in the mind and in ideology it still continues to be preserved...
Symbolism of the event
Time of incident:
the day of devilry, which, according to the beliefs of Christian civilizations, runs from April 30 to the evening of May 1;
the time of the eve of the celebration of the triumph of the communist party and communist construction during the heyday of socialism and the approaching inevitable communism.
Place of the incident - in connection with the incident, toponyms of communist newspeak, based on the cult of personalities of figures from the era of the total dictatorship of the Party, are mentioned:
Lenin Street - a street named after the Leader of the world proletariat and head of the communist state, Comrade. Lenin;
Dzerzhinsky Street - a street named after the first head of the security forces of the dictatorship of the Communist Party in 1917-1926, the organizer of the first mass repressions, the leader of the Red Terror, the creator of the first Soviet concentration camps for “enemies of Soviet power” comrade. Dzerzhinsky.
The river of time, played by the Ob, did not immediately begin to conceal the traces of serial murders. The Kolpashevo residents had to wade into the waters of the history of mass repression twice.
Memory
Until now, this terrible story has not been put to rest in Kolpashevo - there is no worthy monument where people could come to remember their innocently murdered fellow citizens.
In the area of the destroyed traces of the prison and camp of the former Narym okrot department of the OGPU/NKVD, memorial signs (memorial plates) were recently erected about the site of the mass grave of victims of Stalinism.
Literature
Zapetsky V. M. Kolpashevsky Yar. - Novosibirsk: Sibir.kn., 1992, - 128 p.
Kolpashevsky Yar // Stone Bridge: literary art. almanac / (ed. coll.: V. Kostin (chief editor) and others). - Tomsk, 2004. - P. 384-399. - Memoirs of participants in the events in 1979 in the city of Kolpashevo.
Kryukov Vladimir. How memory was blurred: selected articles / Vladimir Kryukov; Volume.reg.histor.-enlightenment.human rights. and charitable organization "Memorial". - Tomsk, 2005. - 75 p.: ill.
Isakov, I. What kind of Russia we have lost, or Response to the book “Kolpashevsky Yar” / I. Isakov // Tomsk Bulletin. - 1994. - January 14. - P. 5.
“The ground collapsed along with human remains”: this is what eyewitnesses recalled about these events / V.V. Cherepanov (and others) // Provincial News. - Tomsk, 2011. - February 25. - P. 19. - From the book. V. Zapetsky "Kolpashevsky Yar".
Sotnikov, A. Kolpashevsky execution yard / A. Sotnikov // Provincial news. - Tomsk, 2011. - February 25. - P. 19. - From the book. A. Sotnikova “Wonders of Tomsk (50 places in the Tomsk region that you need to see before you die).”
Notes
Go In the middle of the 20th century, Dzerzhinsky Street stretched from the intersection with modern Mokhovoy Lane to the lane. Pristansky disappeared as a result of erosion of the bank by the waters of the Ob and landslides (collapse) of slopes into the waters of the river. But until now, the coastal strip in the area of Lenin Street is “listed” as part of Dzerzhinsky Street.
Go Information from the KVT portal. Article "Tomsk region: Kolpashevo Yar and surrounding areas."
Go to The era of developed socialism called the time of the late 1970s by the main ideologist of the main governing and directing body of the country, the Central Committee of the CPSU, Comrade. Suslov. Following him and the other secretaries of the CPSU Central Committee, first the announcers of all two available channels of the Central Television (USSR television), and then all the party functionaries said exactly that: developed socialism. The era was characterized as a demonstration of the progressive development of socialism and a close approach to the stage of communism in the USSR. Complete absence in the press of facts about negative phenomena in society, only information of a rainbow-popular type of continuous victories, milk yield, productivity, steel melting, etc. No criticism, only praise in the style of “Only the USSR is a bastion of peace, humanity, wisdom and socialism “Glory to us, Glory to the CPSU!!!” At the same time, the reincarnation of Stalinism begins (for the first time since Khrushchev’s “thaw” of the 1960s) - themes, again resolved by the Party’s ideologists, themes of praising the historical role and human personality of the leader of the Party, Comrade Stalin; the beginning of the offensive of communist reactionaries against any criticism of Stalinism, the beginning of imposing a taboo on the topic of the Gulag.
Go As part of the formation of communist ideology and the communist worldview, one of the leaders of Soviet communism, Leon Trotsky, in 1918 initiated the revolutionization of mass consciousness: the introduction of communist holidays. They began to coincide with the dates of demonic (according to the classical canons of Judaism - Comrade Trotsky also rebelled against him) holidays.
Go to the end of the 1930s. Kazakhstan was the Cossack Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within the RSFSR. The Kazakh SSR, as part of the USSR, by separating the KASSR from the RSFSR, will be formed in 1937.
Go to the portal "VTomske.ru". Historical moment in Tomsk and the Tomsk region: May 31 (2014).
Go Information from the local history portal “Tomsk Land”, 2012
Go to Information from the portal “Siberian Networks” (Novosibirsk) from 06/22/2010
Go to "VTomske.ru", Historical moment...
Go At that time, the regional committee was the main body of power, management and ideology in the region.
Go Information from the criminal case on the violation of the bodies of dead people, initiated in 1990. The case was soon closed.
Go to Blogs on Bobruisk Courier.
Go Information about memorial plaques is given on the Novosibirsk Guide website
Links
Russian Wikipedia. Kolpashevo Yar
KW. Page “Tomsk region: Kolpashevo Yar and surroundings” (A. Germanov)
Local history portal “Tomsk Land”. About Kolpashevo Yar
Blogs on Diletant.ru. Sitnikova N.D.: “Kolpashevsky Yar” (part of the text)
Full text of the note by Kolpashevo librarian Sitnikova N.D. “Kolpashevo Yar”
Photo of Dzerzhinsky Street and the cliff of Kolpashevsky Yar in 2007 (on “Panoramio.com”)
Portal “Legend”: Kolpashevo Yar and Tomsk Prison. (Ekaterinburg, 07/19/2012)
Blog with material “Kolpashevo Yar”. Photo of the place in the summer of 2010
Portal “Legend” (video): Kolpashevsky Yar... Is the crime cancelled?
Portal Kolpashevo.net: pages 950-953 with photographs of Kolpashevo Yar in the summer of 2010.
Video on YouTube: Kolpashevsky Yar. Is the crime cancelled? (Video service of the Transfiguration Brotherhood), 2012
I asked if the geographical name of KOLPASHEVO, TOMSK REGION, tells my readers anything. Or the name of a specific place - KOLPASHEVSKY YAR.
Colleagues at the Memorial assure me that Kolpashev’s story is widely known, described many times, and scattered all over the Internet. And in the 90s, a small book was even published on this topic.
However, out of 5,000 people who responded on my Facebook, only 30-40 people probably said that yes, they heard, they know what this name is connected with. Moreover, most of these people live (or used to live) in Tomsk and its environs, so they heard from relatives, from neighbors... The rest answered: no, I don’t know, I haven’t heard, I don’t know.
So now we can still tell this story.
The town of Kolpashevo (according to the latest census, a little more than 20,000 people) stands on the high bank of the Ob. The river makes a turn there, and every year “eats” several meters of the high sandy cliff, getting closer and closer to the outermost houses along Lenin and Dzerzhinsky streets. Everyone in the city has been accustomed to this from time immemorial.
In 1979 – right around May Day, April 30 – another two meters of sandy slope slid into the water. And from the vertical wall appeared the arms, legs, and heads of the people buried there. A multi-meter burial ground was exposed, in which people were stacked in dense stacks, in layers. In the upper layer the bodies were completely decayed, but in the lower ones they were very well preserved, mummified in clean sand. They say that one could easily see clothes, and in some cases even distinguish faces that were quite recognizable. There were men and women of different ages, and there were children. Everyone is in civilian clothes.
Several skulls from the top layer fell out of the slope, the boys picked them up, put them on sticks, and began running around the city, scaring passers-by. Soon the whole city knew what had happened. People began to gather towards the slope, someone even thought that he recognized someone’s coat, saw someone’s face... They cordoned off the police and vigilantes. Then very quickly - literally in a few hours - they built a blank fence around the crumbling slope.
The next day, party meetings were held around the city at various enterprises and in red corners. Party agitators began to explain to the population what they were told by the district committee: this was the burial place of traitors and deserters from the war. Somehow it turned out unconvincing: why in civilian clothes? Why women and children? And in general, where do so many deserters come from in a city with a population of 20 thousand?
Meanwhile, a little more sand fell and it became clear that the burial ground was huge. Thousands of people.
The city remembered that there was a prison on this site in the late 30s. In general, it was known that they were shooting there. But no one could imagine how much. The fence and barbed wire were demolished long ago, the prison itself was closed long ago, even the log house was moved to another place, away from the crumbling shore; there was a technical school dormitory there for many years.
In fact (few people in the city knew about this), a full-fledged death conveyor was set up in the Kolpashevo prison: they built a special plank chute along which a person himself went down to the edge of the ditch, where he was killed with a rifle by a shooter sitting in a special booth, if necessary they were finished off with a second shot from a pistol, laid in the next layer, jack with the previous corpse, and lightly sprinkled with lime. And so on until the pit is filled. Then it was filled with sand, and the chute was moved several meters to the side.
So, the bank continued to crumble, and several corpses fell into the water and floated along the river along the entire city. People from the shore watched.
In Tomsk, it was decided to get rid of the burial ground and remove the corpses. The decision was made personally by the then First Secretary of the regional committee, Yegor Kuzmich Ligachev. He consulted with Moscow, directly with KGB Chairman Andropov. The Kolpashevo authorities were ordered to destroy the burial ground and rebury the corpses in another place.
But it turned out that this was not easy to do: it was impossible to drive the equipment too close to the crumbling sand cliff. They feared for the safety of trucks and excavators. But there was no time to dig by hand: the authorities urged it.
By that time, the scale of the giant burial ground was already clear. A drilling rig (again, slowly: a drilling rig) was towed ashore and drilled several holes to determine the contours of the burial site.
Then a new order came from Tomsk containing an interesting, ingenious engineering solution. Along the Ob, two powerful tugboats were driven close to the sandy cliff, tied with cables to the shore, their sterns to the slope, and the engines were turned on at full power. The jet from the propellers began to erode the shore, corpses fell into the water, most of them were immediately cut into pieces by the same propellers. The tugboat crew was ordinary, civilian. No one selected him or replaced him specifically for such an occasion.
Residents of Kolpashev watched the operation with interest. Nobody protested.
Then it turned out that some corpses still floated downstream without falling under the propellers. The mummified bodies floated well in the water and did not sink. Then a cordon of motor boats was set up across the river, in which people with hooks were sitting: their task was to catch corpses in the water. These people were vigilantes, they were recruited from local men - workers, office workers, and the working intelligentsia. A barge loaded with scrap metal from a nearby factory was brought up to the boats. It was necessary to tie unnecessary pieces of iron to the caught corpses with wire and immediately drown them in the deep part of the fairway. This work continued for several days.
Residents of Kolpashev continued to watch the tugboats thrashing their propellers through the water. Diesel fuel was regularly delivered to the tugs: a total of 60 tons were spent on each one. No one was particularly surprised or indignant.
The last team - also from local vigilantes - worked even further downstream: people in motorboats drove around the banks and collected those corpses that the upper boatmen with scrap metal had missed. They were sometimes buried (unmarked) on the shore, but more often they were drowned in the river, cut into pieces with oars or tied with stones for weight. This collection continued almost until the end of summer.
The city spent this summer, in general, calmly. As always.
That, in fact, is the whole story.
If anyone doesn’t understand, I’ll say straight out what seems remarkable to me about these events. This is a story not about Stalin’s repressions, not about the Great Terror, not about the NKVD, not about the state machine of destruction.
This is a story about a Soviet man. About our fellow citizens, countrymen, brothers and sisters. About the Siberian character. About the moral code of the builder of communism.
About the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. About the great and beautiful country that we have lost, and about which if anyone does not regret, then he has no heart.
And one last thing.
Egor Kuzmich Ligachev in 1983, 4 years after Kolpashev, went to Moscow for a promotion: at the suggestion of Yu.V. Andropov, he was appointed head of the department of the CPSU Central Committee. Yegor Kuzmich is alive, until 2010 he was active, tried to participate in the life of his native party. A big fan of Gumilyov's poems.
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov himself in 1982, 3 years after Kolpashev, became the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. He conceived reforms, but never implemented them. He wrote poetry, they say he loved jazz and American films. He died surrounded by loyal companions and loving household members.
On the banks of the Ob, directly opposite Lenin Street in the center of Kolpashev, a long triangular gulley in the sandy slope still remains. For some reason the river doesn’t wash it away. (
Well, five thousand people responded to my impromptu survey in the previous post.
I asked if the geographical name of KOLPASHEVO, TOMSK REGION, tells my readers anything. Or the name of a specific place - KOLPASHEVSKY YAR.
Colleagues at the Memorial assure me that Kolpashev’s story is widely known, described many times, and scattered all over the Internet. And in the 90s, a small book was even published on this topic.
However, out of 5,000 people who responded on my Facebook, only 30-40 people probably said that yes, they heard, they know what this name is connected with. Moreover, most of these people live (or used to live) in Tomsk and its environs, so they heard from relatives, from neighbors... The rest answered: no, I don’t know, I haven’t heard, I don’t know.
So now we can still tell this story.
The town of Kolpashevo (according to the latest census, a little more than 20,000 people) stands on the high bank of the Ob. The river makes a turn there, and every year “eats” several meters of a high sandy cliff, getting closer and closer to the outermost houses along Lenin and Dzerzhinsky streets. Everyone in the city has been accustomed to this from time immemorial.
In 1979 – right around May Day, April 30 – another two meters of sandy slope slid into the water. And from the vertical wall appeared the arms, legs, and heads of the people buried there. A multi-meter burial ground was exposed, in which people were stacked in dense stacks, in layers. In the upper layer the bodies were completely decayed, but in the lower ones they were very well preserved, mummified in clean sand. They say that one could easily see clothes, and in some cases even distinguish faces that were quite recognizable. There were men and women of different ages, and there were children. Everyone is in civilian clothes.
Several skulls from the top layer fell out of the slope; the boys picked them up, put them on sticks, and began running around the city, scaring passers-by. Soon the whole city knew what had happened. People began to gather towards the slope, someone even thought that he recognized someone’s coat, saw someone’s face... They cordoned off the police and vigilantes. Then very quickly - literally in a few hours - they built a blank fence around the crumbling slope.
The next day, party meetings were held around the city at various enterprises and in red corners. Party agitators began to explain to the population what they were told by the district committee: this was the burial place of traitors and deserters from the war. Somehow it turned out unconvincing: why in civilian clothes? Why women and children? And in general, where do so many deserters come from in a city with a population of 20 thousand?
Meanwhile, a little more sand fell and it became clear that the burial ground was huge. Thousands of people.
The city remembered that there was a prison on this site in the late 30s. In general, it was known that they were shooting there. But no one could imagine how much. The fence and barbed wire were demolished long ago, the prison itself was closed long ago, even the log house was moved to another place, away from the crumbling shore; there was a technical school dormitory there for many years.
In fact (few people in the city knew about this), a full-fledged death conveyor was set up in the Kolpashevo prison: they built a special plank chute along which a person himself went down to the edge of the ditch, where he was killed with a rifle by a shooter sitting in a special booth, if necessary they were finished off with a second shot from a pistol, laid in the next layer, jack with the previous corpse, and lightly sprinkled with lime. And so on until the pit is filled. Then it was filled with sand, and the chute was moved several meters to the side.
So, the bank continued to crumble, and several corpses fell into the water and floated along the river along the entire city. People from the shore watched.
In Tomsk, it was decided to get rid of the burial ground and remove the corpses. The decision was made personally by the then First Secretary of the regional committee, Yegor Kuzmich Ligachev. He consulted with Moscow, directly with KGB Chairman Andropov. The Kolpashevo authorities were ordered to destroy the burial ground and rebury the corpses in another place.
But it turned out that this was not easy to do: it was impossible to drive the equipment too close to the crumbling sand cliff. They feared for the safety of trucks and excavators. But there was no time to dig by hand: the authorities urged it.
By that time, the scale of the giant burial ground was already clear. A drilling rig (again, slowly: a drilling rig) was towed ashore and drilled several holes to determine the contours of the burial site.
Then a new order came from Tomsk containing an interesting, ingenious engineering solution. Along the Ob, two powerful tugboats were driven close to the sandy cliff, tied with cables to the shore, their sterns to the slope, and the engines were turned on at full power. The jet from the propellers began to erode the shore, corpses fell into the water, most of them were immediately cut into pieces by the same propellers. The tugboat crew was ordinary, civilian. No one selected him or replaced him specifically for such an occasion.
Residents of Kolpashev watched the operation with interest. Nobody protested.
Then it turned out that some corpses still floated downstream without falling under the propellers. The mummified bodies floated well in the water and did not sink. Then a cordon of motor boats was set up across the river, in which people with hooks were sitting: their task was to catch corpses in the water. These people were vigilantes, they were recruited from local men - workers, office workers, and the working intelligentsia. A barge loaded with scrap metal from a nearby factory was brought up to the boats. It was necessary to tie unnecessary pieces of iron to the caught corpses with wire and immediately drown them in the deep part of the fairway. This work continued for several days.
Residents of Kolpashev continued to watch the tugboats thrashing their propellers through the water. Diesel fuel was regularly delivered to the tugs: a total of 60 tons were spent on each one. No one was particularly surprised or indignant.
The last team - also from local vigilantes - worked even further downstream: people in motorboats drove around the banks and collected those corpses that the upper boatmen with scrap metal had missed. They were sometimes buried (unmarked) on the shore, but more often they were drowned in the river, cut into pieces with oars or tied with stones for weight. This collection continued almost until the end of summer.
The city spent this summer, in general, calmly. As always.
That, in fact, is the whole story.
If anyone doesn’t understand, I’ll say straight out what seems remarkable to me about these events. This is a story not about Stalin’s repressions, not about the Great Terror, not about the NKVD, not about the state machine of destruction.
This is a story about a Soviet man. About our fellow citizens, countrymen, brothers and sisters. About the Siberian character. About the moral code of the builder of communism.
About the largest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. About the great and beautiful country that we have lost, and about which if anyone does not regret, then he has no heart.
And one last thing.
Egor Kuzmich Ligachev in 1983, 4 years after Kolpashev, went to Moscow for a promotion: at the suggestion of Yu.V. Andropov, he was appointed head of the department of the CPSU Central Committee. Yegor Kuzmich is alive, until 2010 he was active, tried to participate in the life of his native party. A big fan of Gumilyov's poems.
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov himself in 1982, 3 years after Kolpashev, became the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. He conceived reforms, but never implemented them. He wrote poetry, they say he loved jazz and American films. He died surrounded by loyal companions and loving household members.
On the banks of the Ob, directly opposite Lenin Street in the center of Kolpashev, a long triangular gulley in the sandy slope still remains. For some reason the river doesn’t wash it away.
P.S.
I opened the lid of this box, yes.
A full mailbox of letters from friends: “Have you heard about the Annunciation massacre?”, “Have you read about the island opposite Nazino?”, “And about Makarikha in Kotlas - look here...” And more, more, more names, names, stories from different eras, even different dates, Gulag abbreviations, recognizable at first glance.
Friends, I don’t know, no. I haven't read it. I didn't even hear it. I didn’t even know anything about Kolpashevo two days ago. And now I know - and I wrote it as I understood it.
Write what you know too. Everyone needs to write. We need to talk among ourselves.
“The Concept of State Policy in the Field of Perpetuating the Memory of Victims of Political Repression,” signed by the Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, will not replace us. And our conversation will not be replaced.
Nothing. Not in a single word of ours.
Every year the Ob River washes away about 15 meters of the Kolpashevo bank. In the place where the river bed is now located, houses once stood. The Ob has changed its high right bank beyond recognition. Kolpashevo Yar is a completely sheer cliff the height of a five-story building. In spring, part of the shore is washed away by water and it collapses.
Kolpashevo Yar is of considerable interest to archaeologists. Repeatedly after the collapse, the remains of prehistoric animals were found here: mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, etc.
The place gained worldwide fame after, on the night of April 30 to May 1, 1979, the slope of the ravine, washed away by spring waters (part of Dzerzhinsky Street), collapsed into the Ob River and uncovered several mass graves of people who were shot and otherwise died in the local department for the special Narym district of the NKVD Siblag in the 1930s.
A terrible picture opened up from the river. Human remains protruded from the cliff, starting from about two meters deep: arms, legs, heads. The opened section of the burial measured up to four meters wide and up to three meters deep. The corpses in the grave were stacked in piles, and while the upper ones were completely decayed, the lower ones were preserved extremely well; it was even possible to identify the dead by their faces. Or rather, killed. There were bullet holes in the back of the skulls of almost all skulls. Many skulls had two of them, with the second bullet hole in the temporal bone of the head.
The boy's burial was the first to be discovered. The mass burial ground did not frighten them, but rather attracted them. Skulls were taken from the skeletons (the top layer of corpses had decomposed over several decades) and first thrown into the waters of the Ob. Then, putting the skulls on sticks, they ran around the city with them in order to scare the girls. They knocked these skulls on the windows of the second floors of the school - the effect of the squeals was stronger.
The news of the discovery of hundreds of dead instantly spreads throughout the small town, and many townspeople came here with flowers and funeral candles, the place and time of the event becoming an unexpected wake. Voices were heard reburying people and a mass grave opening up. The reburial, with an examination of each of the dead, threatened to become a grandiose event. A lot of people gathered on the shore: both curious people and those who remembered what happened at this place in 1937 came here.
Here, at the very beginning of Lenin Street near the elevated bank of the Ob, a special commandant’s office of the OGPU appeared in the late 1920s, and then an NKVD town was built. The Narym district special commandant's office kept records and monitored the serving of sentences of exiled special settlers - since 1928, an unprecedented de-peasantization (liquidation of the peasantry) began in the grain-growing regions of Southern Siberia.
Industrial facilities, administrative buildings, and residential buildings were built by the hands of exiles in Kolpashevo. Some of them, along with peasant huts of the last century, have survived in the city to this day. From 1933-1934 The regime of repression in the country has become more severe. New concentration camps and camp centers of the GULAG system of the USSR were urgently built, and Siblag appeared on the territory of Western Siberia and part of modern Kazakhstan.
The central building of the Kolpashevo OGPU (later NKVD) was two-story, made of timber, facing Dzerzhinsky Street (exit to the panorama of the Ob River). There was a front porch here. From the building to the slope of the shore (coastal ravine) there was at least 150 meters. Three watchtowers rose above the fence, along the top of which were several lines of barbed wire. The town complex also included a prison building, consisting of 6 cells in which those arrested and sentenced to death were kept. It was located near the central building of the Okrotdepartment. In one of the prison cells execution sentences were carried out. The majority of Kolpashevo old-timers remembered the NKVD building as silent and gloomy. As it turned out, on the territory of the camp a large hole was dug for a mass grave, in which the bodies of those shot and otherwise dead were anonymously piled. The bodies were stacked tightly in a layer, which was covered with lime from decomposition; the bodies of a new layer were again laid across this layer. According to the Tomsk Memorial Society, the total number of people shot and buried here during the Great Terror is about 4,000 people...
According to the testimony of former NKVD/KGB employee Anatoly Ivanovich Spragovsky, 99% of investigative cases against convicts were grossly falsified by employees of the Tomsk and Narym departments of the NKVD. Mass repressions were also forced by the exposure control figures sent down from above. The shootings were clearly of a group nature. The pits with corpses were leveled to the ground and were not marked by anything. In some “boxes” clothes were collected separately.
On the May holidays of 1979, soldiers from a construction battalion were urgently dispatched to the site and fenced off the discovered burial site. Vigilantes were also sent here, who organized a vigil at the mass grave and on the approaches to it, not allowing people to even glance at those who died during the years of Stalinism. The police squad, reinforced by vigilantes, remained here all night and the entire next holiday day. It’s one thing to drive away simply curious people and young people who have been stirred up by an extraordinary event in the town. Another thing is to prevent people who believe that their relative died here from discovering corpses. ... Relatives of those who disappeared without a trace in the dungeons of the Kolpashevo NKVD walked to the open grave. Children and wives, brothers and sisters. It seemed to many of them that among the piled corpses they would certainly recognize their loved ones by their clothes. One elderly woman recognized the face of her husband, who had been taken away from home at night 40 years earlier (in 1938), and it was impossible to convince her of the mistake. There might not have been a mistake... Most of the bodies were mummified, which can be explained by the ventilation process occurring in the sand. In the grave they saw peasant bast shoes, children's shoes, and the corpses of women and children. Many of the corpses were in almost perfect condition, some of them were mummified due to the combination of soil and lime with which the corpses were covered in the pit where they were stored after execution. Most of the clothing was preserved on the corpses; moreover, it was possible to identify the corpses by external signs, by facial features. Rumors filled Kolpashevo. City authorities had to give the first clarifications. And the explanations boiled down to the statement that deserters shot during the war were allegedly buried here.
After the May Day demonstration, the first secretary of the Tomsk regional committee of the CPSU, Yu. K. Ligachev, and the head of the KGB department for the Tomsk region, Colonel K.M. Ivanov informed the responsible officials of the CPSU Central Committee and the KGB of the USSR - the secretaries of the CPSU Central Committee M.A. - about the discovered burial. Suslova and Yu.V. Andropova. There it was decided to destroy the remains in other similar Kolpashevo burials.
The Kolpashevo city prosecutor and the head of the police department were instructed not to carry out any inspections to examine the corpses from this burial; they were informed that the burial of the corpses would be done without conducting a forensic medical examination at the discovery site, since the exposed burial contained people executed during the war deserters. They were shot according to martial law.
On May 3, the burial site was surrounded by a high fence with the inscription “Sanitary zone”. Security appeared near the zone to prevent people from bringing flowers and lighting candles. Of course, no one really thought about the issue of reburying the remains, as demanded by the local population.
At first, an attempt was made to excavate the grave from above, from the shore, and to remove the remains of those shot in cars. But this was soon abandoned due to the complex configuration of the burial site and the danger of ravine collapses. We decided to operate from the river. It became a continuous two-week, 24-hour war between the living and the dead. To erode the shore, the KGB officers brought in two river ships - the most powerful two-thousand-ton tugs of the OT series. First, one motor ship, secured with steel cables to the coastal structures, turned its screws towards the ravine and the grave, and began to direct a stream of water down the slope at full power. Then a second motor ship was also involved. But the shore did not give in well, and there were also problems with the corpses. Some of them, as the organizers of the special operation had hoped, were chopped and crushed by the propellers of the ships. But most of the corpses began to be spread throughout the river. The work of the ship's propellers undermined a ravine about forty meters high. When the bank collapsed, two more mass grave pits were discovered. One contained human remains, the other contained preserved mummified corpses. As the bank eroded, remains and mummified corpses began to fall into the river. The cover-up operation cost the state a pretty penny.
One of the ship captains says: “The corpses from the pits began to fall into the water. The frozen top layer of the earth collapsed in large blocks as the lower thawed layer of soil was washed away. There were a lot of holes. The corpses were whole, of different sizes...
Specially organized teams of GOVD policemen, under the leadership of KGB officers, were on duty at the ships in several motor boats; they caught undrowned corpses with wire loops, tied the cargo, took them to the river fairway and drowned them... Those who persisted and did not go to the bottom were chopped into pieces oars and tied metal weights to them again. Day after day, night after night.
During the special operation, some of the corpses were spread over a long distance along the banks of the Ob River.
Over the years, in 1979, the Soviet authorities closed the criminal case; they did not search for those responsible for the mass repressions, with their subsequent prosecution. They did not initiate an investigation even after the fall of communist power, in the 1990s and later, into the fact of concealing traces of the crime.
The river of time, played by the Ob, did not immediately hide the crimes. The Kolpashevo residents had to wade into the waters of the history of mass repression twice.
Until now, this terrible story has not been put to rest in Kolpashevo - there is no worthy monument where people could come to remember their innocently murdered fellow citizens.
