While they are investigating in the matter of the locomotives stolen from the former camp construction site No. 503, one would like to address a few words to those, who certainly do not intend to read these lines, but in case they do, they will consider it advisable not to care about them. Nevertheless ... – one should always take the opportunity, even if there is merely one single person out of a million people ...
We know those, who got ready for this decisive blow against the locomotives, against significant museum pieces and valuable rarities. The devil knows, whether the investigations will lead to the detection of the profiteers. Nonetheless, some managers and high-ranking functionaries might read these lines (including those disposing of a deputee mandate). This is no allusion to any „complicity“ in theft. We are merely talking about people who are „in possession of information“ on the matter in question, about people who know „which way the wind blows“. May they take note of the following:
The witness of hard, unvoluntary, fatal forced labour and human agony, the uncompleted and entirely overgrown railroad line , was given the name „Road of Death“. This name is correct, but it is to be understood rather as a warning, than an expression of horror.
Society had enough time to reflect upon how and why this could happen in their fatherland, and particularly during the construction of the Salekhard – Igarka railroad line from 1947 to 1953. Those, who did not only miss to draw a conclusion from these events but, instead, tried to make this railroad line an object of profit and greed for gain, put their fate to the altar of good and evil themselves. Almost all „entrepreneurs“ who transported away pieces from the Yermakovo camps and trying to turn it into cash, left the world soonafter - in different ways and under utterly strange circumstances.
There is no mysticism around. The railroad line does not take any revenge. We are merely talking about the fact that the objects scattered along the railroad line, do not only represent an objectified remembrance of history, but also the objectified pain, materialized human agony (and the bigger the object, the worse the agony). The absence of willingness to make sacrifices, this disquieting, mighty, uncontrollable emit of a heap of unrealized hope, meets with comprehension and compassion, it is repressed and finally calms down. When it is, however, reflected in profit-seeking desire, it evokes something we call resonance, and then the person greedy for money will be condemned to play the roll of a victim himself – as the next victim of the „Road of Death“.
Moreover, most probably only very few people who take their wisdom from newspapers, noticed some strange coincidence. Just in those days, when the Krasnoyarsk newspapers and electronic mass media reported on the disappearance of the historic locomotives from Yermaki (this is the traditional, colloquial name of Yermakovo), the central press informed about President Putin having personally tested an electric locomotive of the brandnew „YERMAK“ generation in his capacity as an engineer. And this is an interesting omen. While the head of state is testing this „Yermak“ before they eyes of the people, other locomotives are stolen on the quiet and are allowed to roll down the slope of history. Gentlemen, you evidently did not raise your hands on Yermakovo and its unprotected locomotives in time. Your armoured train does not stand on the side-track. It ran off the rails – visible to everybody.
Although one could raise the objection: on the contrary, it is incorrect that in one place old locomotives, which left a whole century behind, disappeared and that new models appear in another place, promising unique possibilities. This is the attractiveness of legality. But if that’s the way it is, then something very serious is going on in our country – not only with regard to remembrance.
Alexander TOSHCHEV,
„Museum of Permafrost“,
Igarka,
05.08.2005.