On the 30th of October, the day on which we commemorate the victims of politcal repressions, a presentation of a new book was held in the premisses of the Museum Center at the Strelka – its title: „Political repressions in Krasnoyarsk (Travel Guide)“. The book was edited by PIK „Offset“ ; the idea to publish such a book goes back to the Krasnoyarsk „Memorial“ Organization; it belongs to the concept of an international project called „Topography of Terror“.
As the author and editor of this book, Aleksey Babiy, who is the chairman of the Krasnoyarsk „Memorial“ Organization at the same time, informed us, the project Topography of Terror” intends to publish a whole series of books – brief travel guides which lead the reader to memorial places of political repressions in various Russian towns. The first books of this series have already been published and are dedicated to the towns of Voronesh, Komosmolsk-on-Amur, Krasnoyarsk, Penza, Ryazan and Syktyvkar.
- The Soviet Power was intrinsically tied to terror, - says Aleksey Babiy. – Compulsory measures, repressions were the main instrument to decide all kinds of problems. History and topography of terror in Krasnoyarsk have not yet been researched sufficiently … Do you think that many students of the Institute of Jurisprudency of the Siberian Federal University can imagine, that their university is located at the very same place, where, some time in the past, there was one of the so-called “sharashkas“ - a special prison of the OTB-1 (Special Technology Bureau N° 1) of the „Yenisey construction project“? And the Central Isolator N° 1 („White Swan“), which is just two footsteps away from the institute, disposed of a rich history. The inhabitants of the little military town are very astonished about the fact that their apartments served as lodgings of a concentration camp in the past…. In this book, we try to at least partly report about all this.
By means of this books, which contain a great number of rare photographies, you can undertake an excursion to all memorial places intrinsically tied to the years of terror. It starts with the prison, which you can see when looking out of the windows of our editorial office. There is a wooden cross, which was erected a couple of years ago besides the building of the Catholic Church – in commemoration of repressed Catholics. On one of the photos from the 1930s you can see the NKVD building, where we nowadays find the Administration of the Russian Federal Security Service of the Krasnoyarsk Region. At the very beginning the house disposed of three storeys only, in 1937, however, another floor was built on top of it and the building as a whole extended up to the corner; and later-on, more parts and elements were added. Memorial plates commemorate the fate of some victims of repressions. These are, for example, the famous surgeon and Archbishop V.F. Voino-Yazenetskiy (Holy Luka), the writers Aleksey Cherkasov and Nikolay Ustinovich, the physician Vladimir Krutovskiy, who was also a functionary of public life, the first director of „Stolby“ National Park- Aleksander Yavorskiy and many more. It will be a long, pathetical excursion …
Ten years ago, on the 30rh of October 2001, a memorial stone was erected just besides the Museum Center on the Strelka, showing a lifte arm in symbolic chains, with a fracture along the line known as „life line“. Every year a meeting is held in this place, there is a wreath ceremony, but the most impressing sight is when tiny rafts with burning candles are lowered to the waters of the Yenisey.
Eduard RUSAKOV
„Krasnoyarsk Labourer“, 01.11.2011