To the editor of the „Krasnoyarsk Komsomol“
Dear comrades!
I would like to inform you about what my generation had to endure, a generation of people, whose family members were arrested for being „enemies of the people“.
I was born on this native soil, in the Krasnoyarsk region, where I grew up as well. I spent my childhood in the village of Sosnovka, Korostelevsk village Soviet, district of Irbey, Krasnoyarsk region. I attended the secondary school in Irbey. I remember the day when in 1937 an NKVD collaborator entered the class-room to arrest our beloved director – Maria Grigorievna Shiryaeva. Later they expelled her son Oleg Shiryaev from the lessons. The also arrested the German teacher Maria Nikolaevna Reni. One day a certain Andriyanov appeared on the scene. He had been sent by the Main Department of Propaganda of the Party District Committee. He explained to us that the above persons belonged to our worst enemies and that they would exterminate them all. And this is what I had to experience personally.
About hundred people were living in my little village; they arrested 17– and none of them ever returned home – among them my father and my brother.
They had assigned „activists“, such as Andrey Kobotka, his son, who was also called Andrey, and Ivan Cervyakov. They did their foul work in our village and made derisive remarks about us all the time, us, the family members of the arrestees.
In the center of the village, where a greater number of people would usually come together, either at the kolkhoz office or in the place where they organized cultural events for the young people, they applied all kinds of unprecedented moral and often even physical torture on us. The chairman of the village Soviet was Boyko. When we had to go and buy something from the shop in Korostelevo, we always had to cross the river Kan. This necessity made the chairman think up a very particular meanness: he captured the people while they were on the ferry, took them to the village Soviet, kept them hungry behind bars for a couple of days and nights, beat them up and insulted them, just as he pleased.
I only went to school during the winter; in the summer I had to carry out heavy labour for the kolkhoz: carry the hay into the stacks, by hand, of course – by means of pitchforks, cut grass with a scythe, transport away sacks filled with grain from the combine. All this had to be done upon the order of this Boyko, the chairman of the village Soviet, and under the direct „leadership“ of Kobotko and Chervyakov. For all this heavy labour they only credited us with one-hundred workdays (unit of work on collective farms; translator’s note), but those who worked with us received ten times as much. They put up resistence to the leaders. As a result they were warned insistingly not to try something like that again. Elsewise they would be jailed, too, for being relatives of the „parasites“ (saboteurs; translator’s note).
Please accept my apologies for my confused scribblings. But everything I have written here is the whole unvarnished truth. As long as I am alive I do not want people, mainly the young people, to suffer from such undeserved insults and humiliations, as I and the boys of my own age had to endure then. I have children and grandchildren, and I want them to learn everything about these cruel and humiliating times. 10 or 15 years ago I was unable to tell anybody about this horrible past.
They chased large groups of prisoners through our village somewhere into the taiga, behind the rivers Kungus and Agul; lots of prisoner transports proceeded through Irbey, as well. There final destination also was the taiga, a place called „Kocha“ – a camp. Once they carried off a new group of individuals. It was in the middle of the summer, and the „enemies of the people“ were unable to walk on. I do remember one of them very well, whose guard or „rifleman“, as they were most correctly called, maltreated him with kicks and blows with the rifle butt. This man was unable to walk on. The man in charge ordered his subordinate, a rifleman called Raksha, to make use of his weapon. And he shot the man publicly – the distance between the prisoners and us was not more than 100-150 meters. The other prisoners were forced to walk on and on. Only in the evening the head of the village Soviet, Boyko, gave the order to lift the dead body up and carry it away. However, therewas no burial on the village cemetery. This is what we, the children, knew for sure.
It is interesting to learn about the details I have mentioned so far, but one should also know, what has become of the tenthousands of prisoners, who were chased through Irbey , Korostelevo and Sosnovka into the taiga. At all events they were not driven back. It is highly probable that they met the same fate as did the Tomsk „enemies of the people“. If our komsomol would take charge of the clarification of this matter, we, the veterans and pensioners, but also our young people, would be very grateful.
I send you a list containing the family names of my compatriots and the names of those people, who lived in the same village, who suffered during the period of Stalin’s personality cult, kindly asking you to do everything humanly possibly to restore the reputation, honour, conscience and loyalty of the Siberian man. And I would also like to express my wish that we keep them in remembrance by documentary evidence, by documents collected by a Krasnoyarsk initiative group, and that their names are to be inscribed in the Book of Memory
in red letters. Unfortunately, I am unable to send you any such pieces of evidence. But my mother saved up photographies showing my father and my brother; they did not fall into the hands of the NKVD collaborators. Everything I wrote about, dear comrades, is the whole truth. The only thing I ask you to please understand is that this letter was written by a man, who experienced the reprisals himself and for that reason was unable to take down these notes without getting excited and without making various grammatical mistakes.
I appealed to you, comrades, because I am of the opinion that everybody has to know about all this and that one has to remind the young people and the komsomol of what happened at that time. It is you, the young people, who are going to build up our new society, without deviating from Lenin’s course. V.I. Lenin and his fellow combatants have chosen the only correct and true path for the establishment of a classless society on earth. All my life I have been believing in Lenin and in our people, and I am convinced that we did not live in vain.
If possible, please kindly publish my thoughts in your newspaper. These lines were written by a veteran of war and labour, a party member since 1949.
8th of June, 1989
Krasnoyarsk
M.V. Salomatov