Konstantin Georgievich Schulmeister reported, how he was arrested in 1938 and then , in accordance with the notorious section 58, sentenced to death for being an “enemy of the people”.
The Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court amended the sentence afterwards: into: 10 years‘ of detention in a camp and the deprivation of all rights for a period of 5 years after serving the sentence. The order of the court was followed by – prisoner transports to Vladivostok, cold, dark, vile-smelling cargo-holds and a mine in the Magadan Region.
After the first year under arrest, Konstantin Georgievich had turned into a „goner“ , so that he was finally transferred into a barracks for entirely enfeebled individuals. Some doctor’s assistant examined the people, who were lying on the dirty floor, half dead, and whenever he diagnosed that there were no life signs anymore, the warden would bash the person’s head in by means of a special , long-handled hammer (so that he did not have to bend down or spatter himself with blood). The dead bodies were loaded on a wheelbarrow and then carted to the waste rock pile near the gold-mine.
In spite of the fact that Konstantin Georgievich suffered from cachexia he somehow managed to get up. The doctor’s assistant asked him who he was and were he came from, and when he learned that the person he was talking to was a „professor from Saratow“, he finally saved his life by giving him a job in the hog house, which supplied the wardens with meat.
The swill was practically not distinguishable from the common food rations portioned out to the camp inhabitants; hence, Schulmeister managed to gradually cocker up by consistently diverging tiny portions from the pig troughs, until he had finally defeated malnutrition. In the spring the wardens were infested by the scourge of the north, scurvy, as well. In the end it occurred to one of them that it would be reasonable to organize vegetable gardens with onions, radishes, carrots, potatoes and other edible plants, which would certainly help to prevent vitamin deficiency in the future.
The one and only expert for such issues was – Professor Schulmeister. During the time when he had been engaged in agricultural plant-breeding, he had always made mental notes about the time duration of germination, conditions for acclimation and requirement of temperature; it would have been too dangerous to write such things down on paper – it might have been considered as espionage.
In 1948 he had served his time, and they told him that upon the decision of an NKVS special board he had been sentenced in absentia to an everlasting internal exile in the Magadan Region. Works with vegetable breeding continued until 1955, when political prisoners were set free. Criminals had already been released on the 12th March 1953.
Konstantin Georgievich asked the camp commanders not to send him home, but give him the possibility to finish his experiments and put the results down on paper. He stayed in the Magadan Region by choice, in order to generalize the scientific and production-related test results with regard to the cultivation of land under conditions prevailing in the far north.
He wrote a book about his research results titled „Plant-breeding in the north-east“ (1958), which became a useful guide for scientific and production workers. In 1958, following a recommendation of the USSR Ministery of Agriculture, K.G. Schulmeister was elected head of the chair in general cultivation of land with the Agricultural Institute in Krasnoyarsk. He held lectures about the cultivation of land; later he became chairman of the methodic commission with the faculty of agricultural sciences. During this time he was in charge of the preparation of aspirants.
Having worked there for two years, Konstantin Georgievich decided to return to his „agronomic“ homeland – the steppe regions on the river Volga, and in 1960, as a result of a competition, he was elected professor for the chair in common soil cultivation with the agricultural institute in Volgograd. In 1993, by order of the President of the Russian Federation , he was invested as „merited figure of science in the Russian Federation“.
I saw Konstantin Georgievich last time during a television programme called „Time“; this was in 1995. The issue was dedicated to the very aged K.G. Schulmeister from the team of professors of the Volgograd Institute of Agriculture. There was one moment, when you could see him on the monitor, while he was holding a lecture in front of his students.
He became 101 years old and died in 1996.
Sergey Orlovskiy, Krasnoyarsk
„Krasnoyarsk Labourer“04.04.2012