Tarkhov is the surname which is exclusively typical for the city of Penza. It comes from the village of Tarkhovo; actually there were two villages with the same name in our province (one in Nizhnelomovsky district and another one in Chembar district).
Representatives of this huge family or probably several different clans were priests, officials, and peasants. Georgy Nikolaevich Tarkhov, whose memories are given below, also belongs to the Tarkhov family coming from the Penza province.
It is very appropriate to say some words about the author’s family roots as an introduction to his memories.
His great-grandfather Konstantin Tarkhov was born in the late XVIII century in the Penza province into the family of a serf peasant and was drafted into the army for 25 years. He had the rank of senior non-commissioned officer and was awarded two St. George’s crosses. After participating in the battle of Borodino, where he was wounded and found unfit for further service, he returned to his homeland and began to work as a saddler.
His son Fyodor was born around 1820. He inherited his father’s workshop and was quite a well-off person. He sent his both sons Constantine and Nicholas to study to the Penza theological seminary where they were apparently given the family name of the Tarkhovs after their native village.
His elder son, Konstantin Fyodorovich (1864), became a priest of the Penza diocese. In 1899, he was transferred to the Tomsk diocese, and in 1914, to the diocese of Orel in Livensk district. Being already in his advanced years he had to participate in the First World War as a regimental priest, whose duties were to read the burial service over the dead soldiers on the battlefield and comfort the wounded. According to some data he was wounded during the battle and according to others he was killed outright by a shell exploding.
The younger son, Nikolai Fyodorovich, the author’s of memories father, did not graduate from the seminary for some reason but took the path of military service: he graduated from the Kazan Junker School and got the title of captain. He served first in Astrakhan, where he married the daughter of the yesaul (captain) of the Astrakhan Cossack army Evpraksiya Konstantinovna Novikova, a hereditary noblewoman by her mother’s side.
Eleven children were born in this marriage. All of them received a good education, but all had hard lives, which were not uncommon among people in the fateful twentieth century. We will focus on the life of the tenth child, Georgy Nikolayevich Tarkhov, and give a place for his narration. Stunning, heartfelt and sorrowful memories came from his pen in 1960, a few years after his release from the camp.
My life
“I was born on November 14, 1901 in Astrakhan. In 1908, my father resigned and moved to Simbirsk (Ulyanovsk) province together with the whole family.
In 1909, my sister Olga Nikolaevna got married; and the couple left for Vladivostok. A year later, my elder sister Alexandra Nikolaevna also went to Vladivostok, and since she was preparing me for exams to enter the cadet corps, she took me along.
I lived In Vladivostok for about a year and then, together with Alexandra Nikolaevna, returned to my father’s farm.
In 1910, the father sold the Simbirsk farm and bought another one in the Moscow province, where the whole family moved.
The farm was small. Besides the house and some outbuildings, there was a small forest, where they mowed hay for domestic animals, and two dessiatinas (measure of land = 10,900 sq. metres or 2.7 acres) of arable land, which was sown with oats.
It was not a truly farm but rather a summer house, where the whole family gathered in the summer. The main source of income was the father’s pension and the rent for the mother’s Cossack land. In 1912, I entered the 3rd Moscow Cadet Corps, whose chief was Emperor Alexander II.
I will not describe my stay in the Cadet Corps, since the life of the cadet is very well described by Ignatiev in his book “Fifty Years at Duty” and Kuprin “At the Turning-point.” I studied well and usually my name was on the top ten list from among 35 cadets.
The Great October Revolution found me in 6th grade (there were 7 classes altogether). The corps, like all other educational institutions of tsarist Russia, were reorganized into Unified Labor Schools with a seven-year term of study. In connection with the food shortages in Moscow I and my younger brother Victor moved to Saratov, where the mother settled after selling the farm near Moscow in 1914.
I was 16 years old. In Saratov I became a 7th form school student, but since we lacked means of living I started working. It was impossible to combine work and study, so I had to leave the school and go through the 7th form course by myself. While working in the Saratov orthopedic workshop I entered the Saratov Agricultural Institute. Lectures were read in the afternoon and repeated for working people in the evening. Lectures were delivered in two buildings: physics – in a new university on the Volga, other disciplines – in the building of an agricultural institute on the Theater Square. Since the breaks were only 10 minutes long, the students bruised along from one building to another and sure enough missed the beginning of the next lecture. At the Agricultural Institute I passed four tests and was drafted to the RKK (Red Army).
I turned 18 years old. First I was appointed as a clerk to the Infantry Inspectorate Office of the 4th Army. But a month later, owing to my undergraduate education and military training in a cadet corps, I was appointed as an adjutant of the Infantry Inspector.
After the liquidation of the Ural Front I was transferred to Samara to the headquarters of the Zavolzhsky Military District.
Before leaving for Samara (Kuibyshev) I married Maria Vasilyevna Golubeva, who started the next day to accompany me in my wanderings. In Samara over seven days they formed headquarters of the 6th Army which included the units and formations of the 4th Army. The army was transferred to Ukraine and became part of the Southern Front commanded by Frunze. The White Guards under the general command of Wrangel began to arrive in Ukraine from the Crimea.
The headquarters made a lodgement in Kremenchug. Having stopped the offensive blow of the White Guards, the Red Army units pushed them to the borders of the Crimea, where on November 7, 1920, a major battle took place, which went down in history as the Perekop battle and ended up with a complete defeat of the White Guards. Soon I fell ill with malaria and was evacuated to Saratov. Maria Vasilyevna accompanied me.
Upon recovery I was appointed as an adjutant assistant to the Command Communication Courses in Saratov. Soon these courses were transferred to Vladikavkaz, so I moved along with the courses. In Vladikavkaz Maria Vasilyevna was employed by the Headquarters Communication Office of the 10th Army. On April 26, 1922, our son Dmitry was born. In Vladikavkaz I was transferred into the Security Escort Troops.
Having formed the Nalchik Security Escort Brigade, I was transferred successively to Samarkand, Aulie-ata (Dzhambul), Saratov, Pokrovsk (Engels) where I formed the 35th separate company. In 1925, I went to study at the Higher Shooting and Tactical Courses for the Improvement of the Commanding Staff; afterwards I was appointed to Krasnoyarsk as the commander of the 42nd separate company. At that time Krasnoyarsk was considered a “remote location” and people there had all the benefits established for these areas. In 1927, I was transferred to Irkutsk in order to form the 20th separate battalion. For three years I commanded this battalion and at the same time performed the office of the commandant of Irkutsk.
On August 29, 1929, our second son Vadim was born. In 1930, I was transferred to Samara (Kuibyshev) as the chief of staff of the 7th regiment. In 1931 I took part in big maneuvers between the cities of Volsk and Khvalynsk. The maneuvers were attended by People’s Commissar Voroshilov. In 1932, I was taken to the first year of the Extramural Military Academy named after. M.V. Frunze.
In the same year I was transferred to the headquarters of the 3rd division located in Samara as a deputy chief of staff.
In 1935, I was demobilized for health reasons and received a small retirement allowance. Since this allowance was not enough to support my family I got the position of the head of military training department of the Volga Forestry Engineering Institute, which was located in Yoshkar-Ola, the capital of the Mari Autonomous Republic. In 1936, I was transferred to the Arkhangelsk Forestry Engineering Institute to the same position.
In December 1937, I graduated from the Extramural Military Academy.
On January 18, 1938, I was arrested.
Arrest
On January 17 I was going hunting as the next day was a day off.
At that time there were days off on the 6th, 18th, 24th, and 30th of each month.
My eldest son Dmitry (he was 15 years old) was going skiing the next day.
Maria Vasilievna was at the lectures at the Evening Pedagogical Institute; she was a first-year student.
Earlier that day in the city I bought a quarter of a liter of vodka to take it to the hunt tomorrow.
Returning home, I cleaned the gun, stuffed cartridges, repaired a ski stick and sat down to supper after the arrival of Maria Vasilievna.
After supper I was going to go to bed when the bell rang. I came up to the door and asked who was calling. A voice behind the door said that he was a student. I asked him to come again in the morning. Then I heard an insistent demand to open the door. I realized that this was not a student, but someone from those in authority. I unlocked the door.
Three plainclothes strangers swiftly entered the room and ordered: “Hands up!” I raised my hands even though I still did not guess who they were. After a superficial search just to make sure that I did not have any weapons on me, one of them gave me a warrant to read which entitled them “… to conduct a search in my apartment and arrest me.” I sat in the dining room, one of the visitors stayed with me; the others went to search the other two rooms. The search lasted for more than three hours. My hunting rifle, accessories for it (cartridges, shot and gunpowder), a revolver cabaret with cartridges and a large number of photographs were confiscated.
Saying good-bye to my wife I thought that I was leaving her for some five years, since at that time they usually did not release arrested people, and the innocent received 5-10 prison sentence, but I was mistaken and we were able to see each other only 19 years later.
When I was taken in a car to the NKVD, I noticed that the street clock said 3 o’clock. Thus, I was arrested at 3 o’clock on January 18, 1938.
Investigation
I was shocked by the biased approach of interrogations. It was clear that the investigators did not want to establish the truth but they were trying hard to make the arrested person pleaded guilty even in defiance of common sense.
Having brought me to the NKVD building three investigators started interrogating me, trying in every possible way to confuse and perplex me. The interrogation lasted all night. At 8 o’clock in the morning the guard took me to the prison, which was in the courtyard of the NKVD building. The prison attendant made me strip naked in the cold corridor whose door kept opening into the courtyard, cut off all the metal buttons and hooks and allowed me to get dressed. Then he took me to the cell. With a clang he undid a huge padlock and, pushing back an enormous bolt, let me into the cell. It was already dawning.
The first thing that caught my eye was perfectly clean floors, which we were forced to wash daily, and very pale faces of the prisoners.
There were 11 people in the cell; almost all of them had higher education and had been party members before the arrest.
So the life in confinement began accompanied with all the hardships and humiliations of human dignity.
My case was assigned to the investigator of the Counterintelligence Department Ivkov who only executed the instructions of Captain Yasko, the head of the Counterintelligence Department. Besides those two persons I was sometimes interrogated by the assistant to the head of the Counterintelligence Department Yakovlev and two other Counterintelligence Department investigators, both in the rank of lieutenant.
Investigator Ivkov, a young man lacking initiative, conducted an investigation inadvertently. Usually in the evening after the lights-out time the prisoners were taken for interrogation one after another.
I was wearing a heavy sheepskin coat which the investigator did not allow me to take off. All night long I was standing and listening to the investigator’s dirty swearing. By the morning my fingers got swollen like sausages by the heat, my legs swelled in narrow boots, so that when I came to the cell I could hardly drag them off my feet.
During the day prisoners were allowed neither to sleep nor even doze sitting. The jail guard on duty continually looked into the “peephole” and when he noticed some prisoner dozing off sitting, he unlocked the door with a rumble, pushed back the bolt and entered the cell; the prisoners got up and the guard told this person off and threatened to report to the head of the prison and the investigator. Literally every other day the prison administration conducted a search: all prisoners were usually grouped in one corner of the cell and called for a search one after another.
The search was carried out very carefully: prisoners were stripped naked, looked into the mouth, forced to squat, and so on.
March 7, 1938, I was taken to the interrogation in the morning. I was standing with my sheepskin coat on all day and all night. In the morning, they brought me a mug of tea and a piece of bread from prison. The investigator keeping watch over me allowed me to sit down and drink tea. As soon as I finished, he demanded that I get up again. Again I was standing all day on March 8th.
At 2 am on the 9th of March I was led to the office of the head of the Counterintelligence Department Yasko, where I was allowed to sit down at last.
After standing for almost two days without sleep and food I was so shattered that I barely retained the ability to think. It was also the accumulated effect of the previous 50 days, when I only managed to have a short nap sitting in the day and was standing up for interrogation all nights. Jasko interrogated me for exactly an hour, and then he called his assistant Yakovlev. They locked the door and, ordering me to remove my shirt and coat, began to beat me.
In the corner of Yasko’s office there was a large clock, which I sometimes involuntarily looked at.
The beating lasted more than two hours, accompanied with shouting and dirty swearing. I only groaned quietly, especially after really hard blows, and tried not to scream in pain.
Yasko and Yakovlev were well trained and understood when and where to hit a person.
At 5:30, seeing that it is not going to end, I began to ask Yasko to stop the beating. I said that I would write everything he wanted.
It seemed to me the execution was the only way out of the situation and was desirable as a way to stop interrogations.
After washing off my blood, Yasko gave me a pencil and a paper and made me give a false testimony about my participation in a counter-revolutionary organization and that I enlisted Lodygin, Radulov and one Osoaviakhim (Society for the Promotion of Aviation and Chemical Defense) worker whose name I do not remember.
That was the end of my honest living, and I was turned from a Soviet citizen into a counter-revolutionary. This stigma was attached to me for almost 18 years until the day of rehabilitation.
The trial
After the beating I was put in solitary confinement where I thought about my hard fate. Sometimes I was called for interrogation and confrontation. The confrontations were particularly difficult. I went through two of those.
The first confrontation was with Radulov, the second one with the Osoaviakhim worker. Lodygin himself after the beating wrote a false self-accusation. My resistance ability was crashed. I could not uphold the truth any longer despite being severely tormented by that.
On July 25, 1938, Radulov, Ladygin and I were judged by the Military Tribunal of the Northern Military Commissariat.
The trial took place in the hall of the NKVD.
The trial was closed and attended only by one of the investigators of the Counterintelligence Department.
Composition of the court included the chairman of the tribunal and two jurors (company commanders who did not utter a single word during the trial).
Neither a defender nor an accuser was present at the trial. And there was only one witness, the secretary of the Party Committee of AFEI (the Arkhangelsk Forestry Engineering Institute) Ogarkov. The witness was very embarrassed and babbled something about “self-praise”. This was the only charge that Ogarkov raised against me, but that was not a crime and therefore the Criminal Code made no provision for such a case. All the defendants and I as well strongly denied their involvement in counter-revolutionary activities and claimed that they were forced to give all the testimony at the pretrial investigation.
However, as I learned a few years later, the verdict stated that all the defendants pleaded guilty and our denial of guilt was not included in the trial record.
I was sentenced to 20 years of correctional labor followed by a five-year deprivation of civil rights.
Radulov and Lodygin were sentenced to 15 years of correctional labor.
I was convicted under Article 58, sub-sections 7, 10, 11 and 8 through 17; subsection 7 – sabotage, sub-section 10 – counter-revolutionary agitation, sub-section 11 – membership in the counter-revolutionary organization, sub-section 8 through 17 – terror, of a recognized counter-revolutionary organization, which I allegedly belonged to.
After the trial, I was to be transferred to a regional prison, but there ran up furious Yasko and canceled the transfer. Yasko turned to me, choking in a rage and tagging his speech with obscene words, and said: “So you testified under compulsion?” I’ll show you compulsion! Tonight I’ll break all your ribs! “. In horror I waited for the night.
I was placed in the same cell with Major Tyrkusov, an employee of the ICS (Internal Control Service). Tyrkusov, being bored with forced loneliness, began to tell me about his adventures during the Civil War.
At 10 pm I was taken to Yasko’s office.
In addition to Yasko there was the chief of the Marine Counterintelligence Department. Both were drunk.
I decided that it would be completely useless to enunciate the truth and it would be most sensible to agree with everything they said.
There is no need to repeat that more than half of the phrases they used were obscene words. The conversation came to the following:
1. I lied at the trial to save my skin.
2. I am ready to write a statement about it.
3. Yasko will appeal against the verdict and get me to be shot.
4. No one has ever beaten me and there was no compulsion during the pretrial investigation.
During the conversation the chief of the Marine Counterintelligence Department struck me in the face with a folded newspaper. That was what I got away with. I was very glad that the beating did not happen again. How joyful I felt, when I returned to the prison cell!
The next day, Yasko called me to his office again and announced that he had decided not to appeal against the verdict.
In conclusion, the following conversation took place between us:
– How do you explain your behavior at the trial? – asked Yasko.
– Can I tell you the truth? – I asked in turn.
– Oh, sure.
– And there will be no repression?
– I promise.
– I was telling the truth at the trial.
– You are lying! – shouted Yasko.
It was the last time when he raised his voice; then the conversation went on in a normal way. I expressed my regret over my unrighteous verdict and said that I reconciled with this injustice, but I asked not to touch my family. Yasko promised. At these words we parted.
I was taken to a regional prison. Yasko stayed to continue turning honest Soviet citizens into counter-revolutionaries.
20 years later, I made an inquiry about Yasko in the human Resource department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where he worked. I was told that this person was registered neither in the MIA system nor in the KGB system. Apparently, he was removed after Stalin’s death, and maybe he was arrested.
Prisoner transport hardships
I stayed in Arkhangelsk regional prison for 10 days. During this time, I was allowed a meeting with my wife, which lasted 5 minutes.
Neither before nor after that time had I seen so many bedbugs as in the Arkhangelsk prison. In the evening we were called to the prisoner transport cell, searched very carefully and taken to the station early in the morning. Having sailed on a steamer across the Northern Dvina, we were packed to cells of a prisoners’ car, so we could hardly move. In that position we were taken to Vologda in a day.
In Vologda prison we were held for more than a month. Duding that time we were several times transferred from one cell to another. The prison was overcrowded, so more than two hundred people were usually crammed into one cell. When you just enter the cell you had to sit in the aisle right on the bundle of your belongings. A few days later you could get a place on the bunks at the feet of a lying person. A few days later you were able to lie on the bunks.
There was a constant turnover of the cells inmates. Some were taken away; others were brought all the time. It was a transit prison.
By order of the Minister of Internal Affairs Yezhov (he was then known as the People’s Commissar) in all prisons they began to brick in the windows, leaving holes the size of 25 by 25 cm. These holes let so little air, and there were so many prisoners in the cells that people literally choked and were running with sweat even though they sat and lay in their underpants. In order to let some fresh air into the chamber the guard on duty opened the doors of the cells in turns.
Every day about 300 people were taken to some jobs for the local NKVD. I got involved in those several times. We dismantled the walls of a church and brought the bricks to the bricklayers who were building the house of the NKVD. For this job we were given extra 500 grams of bread in addition to prison ration which was so small that one could hardly get by on it but just to die slowly. But the main benefit of this job was an opportunity to have some fresh air unrestrictedly while working.
Somewhere about October 1938, we were again packed in prisoners’ cars and transported to Kirov. In Kirov prison, the windows had not yet been bricked in. We removed one frame from our cell window. Those people who had a place near the window were chilly in their coats and others, at the opposite end of the cell, were sweating with only their underpants on. There was more order there than in the Vologda prison: they did not transfer people from the cell to the cell to no purpose and we got more food, but not enough though. There was no any work, and day and night we were languishing with boredom, anguish and malnutrition.
Urki (habitual criminals, as opposed to political prisoners) began to steal but not blatantly so far. One morning in the middle of November we were taken to the prison yard to form a prisoner transport party. Thousands of prisoners were assigned onto the same train. The whole day long we were searched and allocated to different cars, and only in the evening we were taken to the station. The citizens on the streets of Kirov were looking at us and I could easily see on their faces expressions of boundless sympathy verging on despair. They seemed to be about to shout:
– But what is going on here?!
– We wish somebody would stop it!
We were kept at the station for about an hour, because a certain old train had to pass by at that time. It was a thaw, and my boots were holey, and I was standing in the wet snow, which rather felt like water. Finally, we were housed in the heated goods vans, where we spent 42 days. Only once at Irkutsk station we were taken out for sanitation.
The lice were literally tormenting us. Several times a day we took off our shirts so that to kill them.
There was a cast-iron stove in the car. Once a day we were given food, water and coal. Sometimes it happened in the morning, sometimes it was delayed until the evening. When there was not enough coal, we had to burn the boards from the plank beds; when thirst was too strong all the people in the car started shouting at the stations: “We want to drink!”, “Give us water!”, but this never helped.
On December 31, 1938, the train finally arrived at Vladivostok station. We were not admitted for the transfer because there were already 14 thousand prisoners at the station and there was an outbreak of typhus fever. After spending another 5 days in the cars, we were taken back to Dubinskaya station, a few kilometers from the town of Voroshilov. We were detrained and taken to prisoners’ camp, which was called the Dubinsky state farm. In this camp they put up two tents the size of 20 by 7 meters with double-deck bunks inside. They placed 250 people in each tent and the rest, that was about 100 people, were housed in a plywood club (the word is used to name a kind of local community center). The temperature outside was more than 40 degrees below zero, and even though the club was crowded it was very cold.
Urki eventually became absolutely impudent. When they lost a game of cards – urki could fabricate those cards very quickly and very skillfully – they would go to rob “chumps” (that was how they called ordinary people). They had already started to rob people barefacedly in the daytime. They came up to a properly dressed prisoner and offered to take off things they liked or open a suitcase. If this prisoner refused to do it, they beat him. Once the “chumps” (i.e. honest people) turned against this outrage and put up a grand fight. But urki won it since killing a man was a walkover for them, and they used knives and heavy objects.
Finally, about two weeks after the start of the robbery, all the prisoners from our party were taken out of the camp. Calling by the surnames guards began to admit the prisoners back. The robbers, whom the camp administration got to know due to their informers, were the last to let in. When the first of them was searched and, all the money and stolen things taken away, led to the punishment cell, the rest began to burn money. The camp chief who ran up to them was stabbed with a knife in the back, but only his sheepskin coat was cut.
The chief ran sideward and ordered the convoy to open fire. The shooting began. Five people were killed, twelve wounded, the rest raised up their hands. The shooting stopped. At the Dubinsky state farm we suffered greatly from malnutrition. Our ration included 500 g of ersatz bread. It was the only product that we received in full, the rest of the products were stolen by chefs and other camp hangers-on; and three times a day we were given soup containing several grains or cabbage leaves, which we called “skilly”.
The lice continued tormenting us as before. In the first days of May, 1939, we were transported to a transit in Vladivostok. The transit or transit prison was located on the river called Vtoraya rechka. There were huge wooden barracks, crammed with prisoners. Several barracks were fenced off to form a “zone”. I did not know how many zones were there. In total, about 20,000 people were waiting for the steamers. Here, the same as ever, we were transferred several times from one zone to another. On June 28, 1939, 5,000 people including myself got aboard the Dalstroy, one of the two steamers, and were taken to the Kolyma River.
Whereas the road from Arkhangelsk to Vladivostok was a nightmare, the five day sea way from Vladivostok to Magadan could be called a real horror. It was just inhuman to cram 5,000 people in the hold. It is next to impossible to organize a normal supply of food and water. Infinite queues to the “gut buckets”, pitching accompanied with seasickness, endless robberies, desperate screams for help, overt sadistic murders in front of everyone, lice torment – this is not nearly a complete list of all the horrors and terrors of this transportation. That was how my prisoner transport hardships of almost one year long ended and camp suffering began.
Gold mine
From Magadan, among other prisoners, I was transported 600 kilometers to the “Partizan” mine. We were transported in trucks for over a day. 25 prisoners were put on one truck, and as part of the truck body was fenced off for the convoy, it was very crowded. We sat on the floor, knees bent to the chin. In already a quarter of an hour the legs got numb. The whole body suffered from inconvenience and crowdedness. So we were happy with every stop as we could get a little exercise.
The “Partizan” mine was located on the spring called “Svetly”. The prisoners’ camp consisted of tents the size of 20 by 7 meters. There were 20 tents of this kind. When I was brought, there were about 4,000 prisoners in this camp. All of them worked in the mine in two shifts. They applied stoping mining method. We worked for 12 hours a day, and when the shift time was up, we were transferred to additional work for another 4 hours.
The only difference of additional works was that there was no exact output norm and the place was different as well. Most common tasks were stripping of “sands” and removal of “peats”. In fact, it was the same rock, but it was called “sand”, if it contained gold, otherwise it was called “peat”. Thus, there was set a 16 hour working day.
The extraction of gold was conducted in a primitive way. We broke the rock with miner’s pick and crowbar, loaded it with a shovel on a wheelbarrow and carried to the washing. The washing was mechanized. The sands from the wheelbarrows were poured onto the conveyor, which in turn emptied them into the trolleys. The trolleys were delivered by electric traction to the sizing trommel, where they were tipped into the hopper and got into the wash-out gutter.
This workload was so hard – a sixteen-hour working day with extremely poor nutrition – that a rare organism could endure it more than half a year. Usually by spring, the tents were half empty due to the deceased.
On August 20, 1939, it was raining without stopping. We did not have a dry thread on us but continued to work. By the evening the water broke into the stope and the work had to be stopped, as the lake formed on the site of the stope. There began the struggle with the flood, which was absolutely pointless. All the dams and dikes we would build did not withstand the water pressure and were swept away; we got shattered though. Late in the evening, up to the waist in water, we could hardly cross the Svetly spring, which turned into a roaring mountain river. Almost entire camp was flooded. After an hour and a half rest, we were raised in alarm and led to the neighboring mine called “Verkhny Aturyakh “, where we were forced to do the same senseless work: to build dams and dikes that were continuously washed off. We worked without rest for three days. Once we were each given a kilo of bread and half a can of canned food they brought in packs. It rained three days running. Ravines between the mountains turned into fast rivers, carrying haystacks and various structures. Several dozen prisoners drowned. The stress crushed me and could hardly stand on my feet. Luckily, there was a civilian doctor among us who gave me a note to send me to the hospital.
I spent six days in the hospital, located in two tents, and was discharged to work in a team of weak people. Our brigade of the weak had to work the night shift. At seven o’clock in the evening with the orchestra playing at the change in shift, we were going to 16 hour work.
What mockery paradox this music was at the change in shift! Rainy and windy autumn, hungry and exhausted people – and the music!
The food was very bad before the flood and afterwards it was disgusting. In the morning at 12 o’clock we were given 8 pieces of biscuits and a hot medley (thin flour dough). At 5 o’clock we had the same medley for dinner, but now without the biscuits. And at night, at 1 o’clock, again they brought medley to the place of work, again without biscuits.
There was no bread. The roads were all washed out, the bridges were destroyed, and bread supply stopped. How painfully hard it was for the hungry to work all night through! In the morning it was freezing. The clothes, which had been wet with rain in the evening, iced up and so did the wheelbarrows and ramps. The wheelbarrows continuously slipped off the ramps. Finally, at 7 o’clock in the morning, the day shift started and the night shift people went to 4 hour additional work. At 11 o’clock we went to the camp, where we always had something to do. It could be either the bathhouse, clearing up the camp site or insulating the tents for the winter. Somewhere after 12 we were given biscuits and medley, and finally we went to bed about 13. At 17 we were awakened and it started all over again. My strength was nearly over. I had no hope that I would live in such conditions until the end of my term. Logically speaking, it would be right to stop these tortures by suicide. A road passed through the open stope. I considered the following suicide plan, “When the loaded truck goes along the road I will throw myself under it.”
One rainy morning, after working all night under a drizzling rain, I was driving a wheelbarrow laden with gold-bearing sand. A truck with a trailer loaded with a round timber appeared on the road. As the stope was lower than the surrounding country the trucks were passing through the stope at a very high speed. I left the wheelbarrow some distance away from the road and came up to the road side … But I did not have the courage to throw myself under the truck…
It passed by; I went back to the wheelbarrow, cursing my lack of character, and took it to the trommel …
In October, before the end of the gold washing season, they began to transport the weak to other camps. I was taken to the motor depot “Strelka”.
“Strelka”
The prisoners of the “Strelka” camp served the motor depot No. 6. It was located 347 km from Magadan. Among the prisoners there were drivers and trainees at work release position, who used 300 km section of the road from the village of Atki to the village of Sporny. This section was served by our motor depot. There were good garages, an office, a post office, a dining room for the drivers, but for the prisoners there were the same tents. In the tents there were iron stoves, which they fired continuously. If the fire in the stove was not intensive enough it was cold in the tents, otherwise it was too hot. In each tent there were two orderlies (one in the day time and the other at night) responsible for harvesting firewood and firing stoves. You can imagine how much wood was burned in these stoves. The stoves were fired from the last days of August to the first days of June. From September the weather was freezing cold (minus 40-50 degrees). There were only a few days in winter, twenty days maximum, when the weather was different (warmer than 40 degrees or colder than 50). Tents were usually covered with snow in such a way that only pipes protruded. The orderlies shoveled passageways to the doors. There was enormous drifting around buildings and tents during the blizzard. It was a bit easier to work here than at the mine. I’d been working in the garage for a month, and then the rest of the winter I did logging in the forest. Altogether 20 prisoners worked here. Each pair was to prepare and pile 20 meters of six-meter firewood daily. Up to the waist in the snow, the prisoners “swam” from one tree to another. We worked in quilted jackets. Even in the bitter cold you were hot, but you could only rest and smoke near the fire made for each pair.
In the whole camp, I was the only prisoner with 20 year term, and the chief of the camp was very afraid of keeping such a “criminal”. Therefore, when 40 carpenters were demanded from the camp for construction of the concentrating plant No. 3, he wrote me down in the list of carpenters and sent me out of the camp. This was in April, 1940.
Concentrating plant No. 3
We were taken by two trucks to the bank of the Kolyma River. I forgot the name of the village we passed. It was 90 km from “Strelka”. Then along the ice of the Kolyma River the trucks went about 150 kilometers to Seymgun village and then 40 kilometers more away from the river. Altogether we made about 250 km. The road was very bad. In the camp before the departure, they took away our winter uniform and gave us summer uniform. In the day time it thawed a little, but at night the temperature reached 40 degrees.
The road took more than a day. At night, we literally froze. Finally we arrived at the construction site of the factory No. 3 for concentrating the tin ore. The construction site was large. All the buildings were made from the local larch tree. They employed more than 1,000 carpenters. There was another tent camp. The ration was poor.
I was surprised by the ration of the prisoner: it was so small that it was impossible to get by on it. What the authorities had in mind when they established this ration has remained a mystery for me. It is hard to imagine that this was done to ensure that the prisoners died of hunger, although it was true.
Every summer about 100,000 people were brought to the Kolyma, most of them died in the first winter. All the prisoners’ thoughts were about food only. What pleasure it was to recollect the various dishes that I once ate when out of prison. How greedy I felt when I saw bread, which contained 60% ersatz substances. What tricks I invented to earn a piece of bread from civilian staff. What a huge amount of bread I could eat. An exhausted organism requires a variety of food: fats, proteins, sugar, but instead there was bread only, and moreover, it was strictly limited.
By the autumn of 1940, the factory was finished. Some time I worked there. My job involved pouring hydrochloric acid into the chute. Crushed ore with water flowed from the mill through the chute. In some where place the chute made a turn the sand sank to the bottom. My duty was to clean the chute with a shovel. At the first glance it was easy work. But sitting in one place for 12 hours was very tiring, especially at night. In April, the factory got under repair because of the lack of water, as the river on which the factory was located, got frozen to the bottom. I was sent to a team of carpenters who were making the thickener building. Soon this brigade was sent to the forest to hew timber for construction. In the forest we felt even hungrier, since there was nowhere to earn extra bread and we began to starve.
In June 1941, all carpenters’ brigades were sent to Omsukchan to build a concentrating plant No. 7. Again, the transporting hardships began. In the camp, when boarding on trucks, someone pulled off my mosquito head net, and in addition to all the privations I had to suffer from bites of mosquito, which were abundant on Kolyma. We were taken by trucks 40 km to the village of Seimgan.
On the shore, we were got to unload the barge with flour. We worked all night long. In the morning a towboat with five barges went up the Kolyma River. We covered the distance of 150 km for almost three days. One day barges moored ashore. Then more than 400 km. we went by truck again from the bank of the Kolyma River to Magadan, We arrived in Magadan at 4 am on June 22. As we got off the truck, we were told that the war with Germany had begun. In Magadan we spent almost a month on the transit. Every day we were taken to work by trucks, but 13 km from work we went on foot. It rained most of the days in Magadan. The prisoners almost did not have chance to dry out their clothes, as the stoves were not fired.
Finally, a steamer Dalstroy with 8,000 prisoners on board arrived from the bay of Nakhodka. Together with 120 carpenters I was put on this steamer and taken 700 km to the north to the bay “Pyostraya Dresva”. The bay was shallow so the steamer did not enter it and anchored in the road. The prisoners were transported ashore by 200 people on barges, which were pulled by towboats. On the shore we lived for a day and went to Omsukchan on foot. Our group consisting of 120 carpenters was led separately by two guards. We were guided by a local resident, who was orog by nationality. There were no footpaths to say nothing of the roads. We had to wade all the mountain rivers. They were so fast that we could only wade them by 15-20 in line holding a thin pole so as not to be knocked down. The water was waist-deep. We were only transported by boat, 4 people at a time, across the Viliga River, which was very big. The crossing took several hours. In the evening we would stop for the night somewhere in the forest. We would build fires, dry our clothes out and go to bed with our stomachs feeling empty. Back on the shore, before we set off, we were given a 5 day provision, but very few people managed to stretch it out for two days; most of them finished it up on the first day.
Omsukchan
On the sixth day we arrived in Omsukchan. The prisoners who had come to Omsukchan by the winter road had already put up a fence around the zone.
In 1940, about 4,000 prisoners were brought by steamer to the bay of Pyostraya Dresva. When half of the prisoners were transported ashore, a typhoon broke out. The wind was so strong that all the people and cargo that had been unloaded were blown into the sea. Then the steamer stopped unloading.
The steamer went back to Magadan.
We were brought there the following year. Several nights in Omsukchan we slept rough, and then were housed in the tents the size of 20 by 7m, which were typical on Kolyma. In the tents, there were built three tire bunks and crammed them with the prisoners.
The village of Omsukchan was surrounded by three mines: Galimy, Khataren and Industrialny. Each of them was 10 km. away. Tin ore was transported to Omsukchan from these mines. At the factory, it was concentrated to bring its tin saturation up to 40% and sent to the city of Podolsk near Moscow. Immediately we started to make buildings for the factory and for the civilian staff, and roads that went to the sea shore, which was 145 km away, and to the mines. In addition we began to build kitchens, canteens, bathhouses, and hospitals. All those buildings were ready only by the spring. During the winter, 50% of the prisoners died because of malnutrition and poor living conditions. 5,000 prisoners had been brought to Omskunchan that year and there were 2,500 of them left by the spring.
I worked in a carpenters’ team in Omsukchan, Hataren and Galimy. In 1945, I fell ill. I was put in a hospital tent. On recovery, I was left at the hospital as the head of a health-improving station (HS) for weak prisoners. I worked on this position for about a year. But then there arrived a new head of the medical unit, who took me off the job and appointed another person on this position. That man was a real crook: at the expense of an incredibly meager ration of prisoners he saved food for his superior’s pig. Moreover, he constantly supplied the head of the medical unit with a variety of furniture and clothes. The surname of this wretched head of the medical unit was Trifonov.
The chief of the camp, Lieutenant Nosov, sent me to a subsidiary farm, called Merenga, as the manager and foreman. Of all the 18 years that I spent in prisons, only three years that I spent on the subsidiary farm of Merenga were similar to the normal life.
First and foremost, I was not hungry. I was released from escort. In general, there was neither a convoy nor guards on the farm of Merenga. The only chief, Vasily Ivanovich Yereshchenko, was an agronomist and a former prisoner. He had a wife and a daughter. He went hunting and in winter he set traps for foxes. I was appointed his assistant. In the winter there were 12 prisoners on the farm and in the summer 40 more people would be brought.
The subsidiary farm had 7 hectares of arable land, where they grew cabbage and turnips. There were three greenhouses with tomatoes, one with cucumbers and 10 greenhouses with onions. Radish was grown outdoors.
In addition, after work, prisoners were allowed to gather wild onions and berries and go fishing. There was a 30 m long dragnet that was the property of the farm. With this dragnet, prisoners went fishing in the river Viliga. Sometimes the river swelled, then up to 200 pieces of chum salmon, 3 kilo each, were caught in the net. There was also a lot of malma trout. Every summer, they salted up to 5 tons of chum salmon and smoked up to 3,000 pieces of malma trout. Chum’s caviar was salted in 6 packages of 10 kilo each.
I especially loved long winter evenings. After a short winter day, I would check the amount of timber in the forest, the peat-plant blocks, the manure brought from the nearest village and the food given to horses. Then I would go away to my room, light the fire in an iron stove, make some porridge and tea; and in the light of a kerosene lamp I started reading a book sent to me from Vladivostok by my brother Sergey Nikolayevich.
Sergei Nikolayevich was the only person from all family and friends who did not leave me in the lurch and kept regular correspondence with me, sent me parcels of tobacco and books. I have been so very grateful to him for all that. Thus my relative well-being lasted about 3 years and ended up with a transfer to penal servitude.
Among the criminals, there was a division into groups of “thieves” and “bitches”. Thieves were very proud of their status and treated each other with respect. They believed that only thieves are true people. All other “chumps” (that is law-obedient people) deserve nothing but contempt. Although “bitches” were thieves too, there was an irreconcilable hostility between them. At every opportunity, they killed each other. In the end, they had to be separated and put into different camps, those for “thieves” and for “bitches”. The third group, “muzhiks”, was the most numerous. There were political prisoners. Both “bitches” and “thieves” treated this group with contempt.
Penal Servitude
In late September, 1950, in Omsukchan there was already a true winter with deep snow and severe frosts. I was called to Omsukchan and together with other prisoners, who were serving their term by the Article 58 as counter-revolutionaries, was sent to penal servitude. Altogether, about 300 people left Omsukchan. We were taken to the bay “Pyostraya Dresva” by trucks, loaded on the steamer “Soviet Latvia” and drove to Magadan. Here we were sewed number patches on the cap, on the back and on the right knee. I had the number A2-533.
Every 1000 numbers started with another letter. When the alphabet had reached its final letter, the numbers began with the letter “A” again with the addition of the figure 2:A2-533.
The penal servitude regime was very strict. The bars were fit on the barracks’ windows. The barracks were locked at night, and gut buckets were left inside. We were taken to work in columns, with every five people holding by the hand. We had to walk in step and look downwards. We worked 12 hours a day. Three times a month there was a day off, which was used for washing in the bath house.
The washing procedure was very complicated. There was no a bath house in the camp, so we were taken to the sanitary checkpoint where we were divided into four huge groups and washed in turns. The washing, including four counts of the number of prisoners, took 5 or 6 hours. Both day and night shifts were on that day in the barracks, which were packed, especially at night, when people literally had to squeeze themselves into the bunks. The food was bad as well. There were fewer lice though. And the theft had stopped completely. At last we were separated from urki. All in all there were 19 camps named “Berlan” with the penal regime. I was in the 18th one in the city of Magadan. Soon after the arrival 20 elderly people, carpenters, were selected and they sent 64 km away from the city to build a camp for loggers.
I was appointed a foreman. We went to that place on foot, following a sled with tools, food and tents, dragged by a tractor. On the way we spent a night in a women’s camp, outside the zone, in the tent of deconvoyed tractor drivers.
Arriving at the site, the camp chief walked around a small piece of forest; I walked after him making notches on the trees. This was the beginning of a new forest camp.
By the evening we cut down part of the forest, cleared ground from snow, built two frames and covered them by tarpaulin: one tent was for the convoy, another for prisoners.
On the fourth day they brought a new batch of 100 women, on the fifth day 100 women more, on the sixth day another100 women. The carpenters had a lot of work to do in taiga: we built barracks for the convoy, a house for officers, a bakery, a house for tractor drivers, a garage, a canteen, a hospital, bathhouse, etc.
It snowed a lot in the winter: the snowdrifts in the forest were one meter high, and in the dells, up to 1.5 meters. So before cutting a tree one had to shovel off the snow. When cutting trees, it was not allowed to leave the stump taller than 20 cm. All women were wearing quilted cotton pants.
The norms and rates were very high. Moreover, the workload coefficient was 0.6. As it turned out later, the camp administration did not have to apply this coefficient in the spring. And that had caused so many troubles by that time. It was impossible to fulfill the norm just working honestly. The camp administration tried by all means to press the people to fulfill those extremely high norms. The women who failed to do it were considered “saboteurs”. Poor women! They were forced to do male’s work that they had never done in their life. The norms were not reduced for women. Drowning in the snow, no matter what the weather was like, at a very low temperature (50 degrees below zero) and in a snowstorm, they wandered from tree to tree to cut it, chop off boughs, burn them, sort out the trunks and stack them up. It was not the hardest job yet. There were penal servitudes where women worked underground in the mines.
Spring was the hardest time at the logging: it was especially difficult to work when the snow melted. The workers were wet all over. Melted snow clung to the fallen trees so that it was really difficult to sort them out and even harder to stack them up. The logs, which were two-meter long, were carried to the stack on the shoulders. Because of that the quilted jacket became wet, and by the evening the woman got wet all over. In April and May the sun, reflected by snow, was very harmful to the eyes. The eyes started to ache by the end of the working day. Some people lost their eyesight. Those were sent to the “mainland” then. I do not know if their eyesight was restored. It was so easy to supply all loggers with matt-surfaced protective glasses, but they were not available.
In March, the security officer, Pavlov, arrived in the forest. He asked me about my job before the arrest. I answered that I had forgotten my life “on the outside”. “Well, and we’ll never forget what you’ve done,” Pavlov replied. Saying that, he expressed so much hatred and contempt that I felt deep outrage, but I curbed my temper and did not object to it.
I hardly slept at night. I was thinking about 14 awful years of my previous life. There was nothing except pain and there were 6 more years of suffering waiting on me. I would endure physical suffering, but the moral ones were completely unbearable. In the morning, I decided to end my life by suicide. I lay in front of the tractor, going at full speed. I lay face down and closed my eyes. When I looked up, I saw a caterpillar of a stopped tractor above myself; it stopped within 5-10 cm. from me. The tractor driver, very pale, began to scold me. The sentry on the tower opened fire to raise the alarm. People began to rush to the scene of the incident. I went to the office. I was a nervous wreck and burst into tears. An hour later I was sent to Magadan on a tractor, escorted by a machine gunner, who was given an accompanying note. In Magadan, they arranged a week investigation into the reasons of my attempted suicide. The investigation came to nothing, and I was assigned into carpentry workshops again.
In March 1953, we were announced the death of Stalin. This news was received with great joy by the prisoners. Everyone trusted in a fair policy of the new government. And those hopes came true. Urki were granted amnesty. The authorities also began to examine impartially the counter-revolutionaries’ cases. I wrote a complaint that, after its passing around different courts for more than a year, resulted in my full rehabilitation and the cancellation of the verdict. This happened after I had been released from the camp and sent to exile.
Release
After the death of Stalin, the name of the “penal servitude” was abolished, we were allowed to remove the number patches, bars were taken out of the barrack windows, barracks were no longer locked at night; Makarenko’s educational methods, early release and other reasonable measures were introduced.
On December 30, 1954, I was released early from the camp for a good job and, among other 20 prisoners, was exiled to the city of Magadan. Thus, I spent18 years, minus a few days, in prisons, camps and penalties, being quite innocent!
What a cruel and completely useless justice!
What a maleficent policy of Stalin! Throughout its entire history Russia have not seen such cruelty!
I do not know the figures but I guess, on the basis of some estimates, that over 50,000 people were shot over those years, about ten million people were imprisoned and camped, of whom about half died from excessive labor, exceptionally poor nutrition and disgusting living conditions.
The number of victims is appalling even for Russia. Oprichniks headed by Ivan the Terrible were guilty of hundreds of deaths, perhaps thousands. Peter the Great executed the whole army of archers, which numbered several tens of thousands. In the worst time of the Biron’s terror, prisoners and executed were counted thousands. After the December armed uprising, Nicholas II hung only five people, about a thousand were exiled to penal servitude and the Caucasus.
But Stalin outpaced all of them and bears millions of ruined lives on his conscience!
I wonder why he is still lying in the Mausoleum next to the Great Lenin, to whom he represents the complete opposite.
On October 30, 1961, the 22nd Congress of the CPSU decided to remove Stalin from the Mausoleum.
From the Tarkhov family album
