The repressions of the 1930s were in full swing. Penitentiaries and places of solitary confinement in the Krasnoyarsk Territory were crushing down hundreds of thousands of prisoners. The hellish flywheel of death had been set in motion and was already working at highest speed.
Hence, more than 20 men, all bearing the family name of Busunov, were arrested in the hamlet of Busunovo, Krasnoturansker District. And on the 6th of November 1937 they detained the hierophant of the Trinity Church in Minusinsk - Nikolai Ivanovich Komarov. In order to give this counter-revolutionary plot the meaning of extreme importance, they besides arrested another 31 clerics. A troika of the Krasnoyarsk regional NKVD authority, without further ado and without giving further attention to the matter, decided on the 27th of November 1937 to sentence 27 men to death by shooting. The judgement was enforced on the 6th of December of the same year.
Yekaterina Aleksandrovna Maksimova, the wife of the famous spy Richard Sorge, was exiled to our region and served her sentence in the hamlet of Bolshaya Murta; and here she died, but the exact location of her burial plot is unknown. Olga Stepanovna Mikhailova, the wife of Semyon Buyonnov, soloist with the Bolshoi Theater spent the time of her exile in Yeniseisk; she was working for School N° 45 as a charwoman. The famous actor Georgiy Stepanovich Zhzhonov served his first sentence on the Kolyma, but was arrested once again after his release and deported to Norilsk. Ashkhen Stepanovich Nalbandyan, the mother of Bulat Okudzhava spent her exile in Bolshoi Ului. The son of Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova – Lev Nikolaevich – was arrested to a five years‘ exile at the time when he was still a student of the forth course at the Faculty of History with Leningrad State University. He was released in 1943, in the process of fighting actions happened to get up to Berlin, was arrested again on the 6th of November 1948 and sentenced to 10 years. Having been released for the second time he wrote two dissertations (historic and geographic sciences). The famous singer Lidia Ruslanova also spent the time of her exile in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. And the wives of V.M. Molotov und M.I. Kalinin turned out to be enemies of the people and were to serve their sentence in our region, as well. Nobody was spared by Stalin, not even persons of highest standing working in his immediate vicinity.
As of 1935 until 1939 A.Y. Vyshinskiy was the General State Prosecutor of the USSR. During court hearings he made the “scientific” case that the best proof of the guilt of an arrestee is his personal confession about the crime he committed. Mass arrests of the 1930s caused a congestion of penitentiaries, places of solitary confinement and camps with prisoners, most of which had refused to admit their guilt in made-up accusations of anti-Soviet activities.
The Politbureau of the Central Committee of the VKP (B) headed by Stalin hurried up with the forwarding of its new decisions to all republics, regions and territories, in which examining magistrates were vested with all powers; they were even authorized to decide at their own discretion about the use of physical force during examinations, in other words torture remand prisoners. This is Stalin’s flywheel of the extermination of his own people.
The famous writer Boris Vasilev, author of the novel „The dawns here are quiet“, quoted such examples during the radio transmission „Open Studio“, when he was talking to journalist Andrei Svitenko. From August 1937 till October 1938 about two million people became victims of repressions, more than 670.000 of them were shot. And during Stalin’s rule more than 16 million people were hit by repressions. More than 40.000 military experts were shot on the eve of the Great Patriotic War. Hence, the army was principally without any serving commanders.
Vyshinskiy‘s unveiled „scientific“ thesis, backed up by tortures, brought rapid results. The prisoners, tortured until they found themselves on the edge of madness, signed the absurd bills of indictment, thus admitting all crimes they were reproached with. Hence, in 1937, 61 inhabitants of our district signed their own death sentences, one third of them were inhabitants from Usinsk. And the year after, 200 people were shot. In August of the same year 34 inhabitants of Yermakovo were exterminated, half of them came from Usinsk. And on the 10th of March 1938, at daybreak, a horrible, bloody tragedy took place: 79 inhabitants of our district were executed in Minusinsk. Those, who had to suffer most from repressions were the inhabitants of the hamlet of Verkhneusinsk. In this space of time more than 3000 inhabitants were counted in this place, half of them were effected by repressions, 118 were shot.
The tragic 1930s and Stalin’s repressions have meanwhile become a thing of the past, but the painful loss of human lives is being inextinguishably kept in people’s minds.
I. Zorin
Pain and Commemoration. Dedicated to the victims of political repressions during the 1930s till 1950s in Yermakovsk District, Volume 2