You were arrested because people denounced you,
Just because of anyone’s guess,
Without any official bill of indictment,
It was just as simple as that.
And those Gulags, the Siblag, Karlag, Kraslag
And all the other camps gorged you.
A lieutenant managed to establish the KrasLag within just one month. Afterwards he went to Moscow to attend and celebrate his promotion. In those years the two words „promotion“ (povyshenie) and „maximum penalty“ (vyschka) had one and the same origin.
Quotation from an order dated the 23rd January 1938: „The organisation of headquarters and administration of the Krasnoyarsk Reform Labour Camp with the NKVD USSR based in Kansk has been definitely completed ... All assigned duties of a head of the KrasLag administration will temporarily be exercised by A.P. Shishmarev, first lieutenant of state security, as per authority given to him“.
May Andrei Shishmarev’s low rank not confuse any of the readers of this text. First of all, a first leitenant working for the state authorities conformed to the rank of a major serving in the army. Secondly, Shishmarev was an expert who had a lot of professional experience. He had participated in the defense of Tsarytsin; he had fought against Kolchak and his army. After the civil war he had worked as a commissar for the Cheka, assistant of the head of the special department of the Primorie Army. Later, he became an expert in the establishment and organisation of camps. Far East, Middle Asia, West-Siberia .... Everywhere he, Shishmarev, occupied the position of the head of the camp administration. He managed to establish the KrasLag within just one month, and on February 17 he travelled to Moscow to celebrate his promotion... And then, all of a sudden, he stopped leaving his marks, his tracks became all covered, for in those years the two words „promotion“ (povyshenie) and „maximum penalty“ (vyschka) had one and the same origin.
The KrasLag – one of the classical camps of the timber industry – joined camp units and sections in several districts of the south-eastern parts of the region. The camps were not really big (600-800, rarely more than thousand inmates), but their number increased at a fast pace. In all, in that very January 1938, there were already 23 camp sub-sectors being operated in the regions of Ilansk, Achinsk and Irbei. In April another five camps seemed to appear from nowhere – they were all part of the Sayan camp section.
The first transports of prisoners came from prisons of the Primorye Region, from Khabarovsk, Chita and the Ukraine, and towards April 1938 the so-called „contingent“, already numbered 9224 individuals. On the first January 1939 the number of inmates was 28000, who, in the aftermath, fell 1.312.000 cubic meters of trees, and they did this by the aid of 2074 horses, 84 tractors, to motor vehicles and, in order to express it in Solzhenitsyn’s words – accompanyied by the putrid smell of farts.
Afterwards
they brought people from Alma-Ata and Semipalatinsk. Later, in 1939 and 1940,
there were transports of prisoners arriving from Leneingrad and the central
parts of Russia.
Towards January 1941 there were 17829 „lumber jacks“. The vast majority – „Enemies
of the people“. They fell trees, but in the end they went down like flies
themselves from hunger, pellagra and dysentery. According to information given
by the „Memorial“ Organization the death rate of those years averaged 7 to 8%. A
fact, which is in no way astonishing in view of the correlation between
pysically hard labour and the usual, daily food norm for prisoners: 400 grms
bread, 70 grms pearl barley, 90 grms meat (eight times a month), 150 grms fish
(22 days a month), 600 grms vegetables and potatoes. Many prisoners sold their
bread ration, particularly during the war. And these were the inmates which
finally died first.
In the summer of the year 1941 many thousand prisoners from Lithuania were transported to the KrasLag, mainly people who had been arrested between the 13 and 19 June 1941. Many of them died in 1941-1942. Only late in 1942 and early in 1943 in absentia special bords brought „official“ charges against them, so that a great number of Lithuanians were only convicted after they had already died. Those who had survived the moment of their verdict received between five and ten years of camp detention, some were shot dead in the prison of Kansk.
The KrasLag archives have been preserving plenty of interesting and at the same time very shocking documents from those years. The resolution of a „troika“ – just written on a scrap of paper: to be shot! Some tractorist from a benighted one-horse town denounced another person by accusing him of supposed contacts with the English counter-intelligence. He just made a short statement – and that was it.
In January 1942 the chased several thousand Volga Germans into the KrasLag.
Having been accused, they had not been sentenced on any section, nor were they
informed about any imprisonment, but they were Germans – and this very fact gave
cause „for serious concern“.
They were all placed in separate camp zones, but behind the same barbed-wire
fences, watched by the same guards, living in the same baracks, being portioned
out the same food rations, suffering from the same diseases. The only difference
was that everything here was called „the trudarmy“. A very remarkable fact is
that in the „trudarmy“ sections the party and komsomol organizations were still
in operation, although they would not accept any new members. The Germans were
released from the KrasLag in 1946 ... and were directly sent into exile.
In Reshoty (to where the camp administration was relocated in 1948) there were Japonese prisoners of war, as well. Four years ago their mortal remains, their ashes, were exhumed from all known gravesites and taken to their home country, the Land of the Rising Sun.
More than hundred-thousand prisoners had gone through the KrasLag by 1950. About half of them had been sentenced on political sections. Then the political prisoners were rehabilitated. Almost all prisoners, who under Stalin’s rule had been taken to camps, were restored to freedom, and their former colonies became colonies for criminals only.
Vladimir Kovalev
„The Eye-witness“ N° 5
4 February 2003