I, Gennadiy Nikolaevich Byakov, was born in the region of Kirov, Urzhumsk district, Selenursk village soviet, village of Tokari, in 1904; my parents were farmers. I went to school for four years.
On the 2nd of December 1937 I was arrested. At that time I was working as head of the all-district office for livestock procurement. I was accused of sabotage - section 58. And then article 111 for non-politicals - abuse of authority, because I ostensibly had not spread the cattle feed into the troughs but thrown it in front of their feet, whereupon they had not put on weight.
Of course, they had to accuse me of something, for I had been kept in prison already for six months without trial. I requested the calling of witnesses, but none of them accused me of anything. I was sentenced to five years and disfranchisement. And then they sent me into internal exile to the region of Krasnoyarsk, to the camp in Tugach. This happened in 1938. I was not accompanied by armed guards because I had the status of a non-political prisoner. At first I worked as the head of the supply section, foreman, and then as the head of the horse station. And later I stayed here and this place became my permanent residence. I got married. Children were born.
I knew Vassily Ivanovich Lyutov, who lived in the settlement of Tugach as a political exile, and if my memory serves me right, he was working as senior livestock expert for the staff or office of the Y-235 camp administration, where they had a farming department (on the 2nd floor). In one of the office rooms the farming department was housed; the other one was occupied by the department of goods traffic. And I was working in an affiliate in Klin Marin, 10 km away from Tugach, on a podkhoz (a farm attached to a factory), as head of the horse station, and there we also disposed of a livestock expert.
Vassiliy Ivanovich arrived, stayed there for two or three days, looked for the cattle and explained everything worth knowing on horse breeding. He also went to the second podkhoz in the village of Samsonovka, 40 km away from Tugach. Again he stayed there for two or three days. He did not like to sit in the office or workroom. Most of all he liked to spend the time with the animals in the cattle-breeding station.
I remember him as a serious-minded, restrained and polite person. But he often looked sad. After work, in his free time, I often saw him with a book in his hands; he read everything that fell into his hands. He talked only little. I remember him very well, although many years have passed since then. He last lived in the settlement of Tugach, in the school building, in a very small room. He was taken ill with tuberculosis of the lungs and died in the autumn (Nov.) of 1950. They placed his coffin with the dead body in the club of the settlement of Tugach, where the inhabitants and those who had worked with him could pay their last respects to him. He was buried on the cemetery in Tugach.
Tugach was surrounded by many forced labor camp sub-sectors, and the prisoners, many of whom starved to death, were simply piled up on top of each other and buried without coffins. The cemeteries have been leveled to the ground, the grave mounds did not survive.
Ivan Vassilievich Medvedev worked for the camp guards as a dog handler. If somebody tried to escape, he set the dogs on him and then shot him personally. If a hungry convict whose strength had failed him was unable to work, the escort forced him to stand on a stump of a tree, in severe frost, and there he kept standing, until he had frozen to death. The daily bread ration was limited to 400 grams, and if you squeezed the bread, water would drip out. The work was hard: felling trees, etc. Bugs, mosquitoes, dense taiga.
There were not enough people who were allowed to run about without escorts who could have buried the dead, and there were not enough coffins, either. They took the dead bodies away from the camp in a coffin, and then they were dumped out, with a wooden tag tied around their wrists, indicating the section on which they had been sentenced, the term duration and their family name. This was how they buried the political convicts. Most of them starved to death.
Today I am living in:
Krasnoyarsk region
Sayan district
settlement of Tugach
Byakow, Gennadiy (son of Nikolay)
I herewith confirm that the above memoirs correspond to the truth.
In case my memoirs are to be published, I will not have any objections against it.
The notes in the wording of Gennadiy Nikolaevich Byakov were taken by Irina Vassilievna Lyutova, member of the Coordination Counsel of the “Memorial” Society.
29/VIII-1989
Settlement of Tugach-Novosibirsk