Just under a century ago, Kolyvan District was bustling with settlers, frenetic development, expanding farms. Yet all these settlers were exiles – kulaks, victims of the Great Terror, ethnic Germans – dumped here and forced to survive by their wits in a mosquito-infested Siberian swampland. When the repression finally ended, many left, and most of what was built was swallowed up by the land. But there are still some here who remember…
Kolyvan District is just 130 kilometers from Novosibirsk – Russia’s third most populous city. But most of its formerly bustling villages are now overgrown ghost towns. Of the 20 settlements to which victims of Stalinist repression were exiled in the 1930s and 1940s, only five show faint signs of life. Together, these 20 settlements once comprised the “Pikhtovka Commandant Zone.” Barely anyone who was forcibly resettled here is still alive, but those who are remember everything and are willing to talk.
Seventy years ago, there were stores and schools nestled within the taiga’s dark-needled pine forests, and trains came through on narrow-gauge tracks. There was even an airport. Much of this was built by the political prisoners and Volga Germans exiled to this remote corner of Siberia. Most left at the first opportunity. The villages of Atuz and Ryamovoye are no more. Gone are the tiny hamlets Dalnaya Polyana, Zhirnovka, and Vershina. Old maps attest to the erstwhile existence of Alexeyevka, Noskovo, Yurki, and Cheremshanka. Where they once stood, the grass now grows to human height.
In fact, the villages of Pikhtovka and Ponomaryovka are all that’s left of the Pikhtovka Commandant Zone. In this corner of Kolyvan District, they are the largest clusters of human habitation, with 500 people in Pikhtovka (formerly the district center) and fewer than 100 in Ponomaryovka.
A few weeks before June are the best time of year here: you can work on your vegetable plot and take care of your livestock, or just stroll through the village. But soon, the tall grass makes walking hard and the mosquitoes emerge – huge taiga mosquitoes. If you stand in the middle of the village and listen you can hear their buzz merge into a single, powerful shriek. Modern repellents don’t work against these insects – people use the age-old remedy of smearing their livestock with tar.
And better not to visit in early spring either: the mud makes the dirt roads impassable. And then there are the bears that occasionally raid the village. The locals joke: the farther you stray from Pikhtovka, the fewer people and the more bears. Several years ago, residents of Ponomaryovka managed to get the road joining their village with Pikhtovka paved, making travel between the two reasonably easy. It’s probably the only positive change the area’s seen in recent years.
Kolyvan District is probably best known for its peasant uprising against the Bolsheviks. It started in these parts in 1920 and then spread across much of Siberia. The rebels were rising up against prodrazverstka – the Soviet government’s confiscation of the fruits of their labor. The uprising was quickly suppressed, and the rebels were either shot or sent to labor camps.
In the late 1920s, the district became a dumping ground for undesirables. The first wave of exiles was made up of kulaks, peasants who had larger and more prosperous farms than most, making them natural opponents of the Bolshevik’s confiscatory policies. After 1937, most of the arrivals had been convicted of political crimes using the laws that were the main instruments of the Great Terror. Pikhtovka could not accommodate this later flood, so the exiles fanned out to settle new villages.
A new wave of repression came in the 1940s, sweeping up more political prisoners and the families of Soviet soldiers who had “treacherously allowed themselves” to be taken prisoner by the Nazis. These exiles further developed the area, clearing the taiga forests to build schools and bridges to join the villages scattered along the winding Shegarka River. They also extended the narrow-gauge railway to enable the export of timber.
Those who fell under the authority of the Pikhtovka Commandant had been granted life but not the right to choose how and where to live it. Poets, surgeons, professors, and women with children were forced to settle in shacks and cowsheds with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The work was cripplingly difficult, and conditions were unbearable. People had to literally fight for the right to survive the cruelties of Kolyvan District – with the commandants, with the locals, and with the unforgiving taiga.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, political prisoners started departing Siberia, having been granted permission to return home. But it would be another ten years before exiled Germans were allowed to leave. By then, some families had put down deep roots in Siberia. German surnames are not uncommon here.
The tiny outposts where exiles had labored and that surrounded Pikhtovka began to die out. By then Pikhtovka itself had lost the status of “district center.” The schools and daycare centers were still there, as was the sawmill that helped fulfill the timber quota. The airport even continued to function, since the area – being surrounded by swamp – was only accessible by land in dry weather.
Today, Pikhtovka is a living monument to the past. The daycare centers and sawmill that the exiles built are being reclaimed by nature and slowly falling apart – and little wonder in a village where for every inhabited house there are two abandoned ones, with sagging fences and gaping holes instead of windows. At the edge of town, trees have taken root in houses and have begun to poke through the roofs.
A symbolic part of Pikhtovka’s history is the log road through marshes and swamps that was started by peasants convicted as kulaks and continued by later waves of the forcibly resettled. The plan was to connect Pikhtovka to Bakchar, a village in Tomsk Oblast, also settled by exiles. But construction was eventually abandoned due to a combination of the unbearable conditions and the high mortality rate among workers. Today, it’s hard to find any evidence of this construction project: the logs have long since sunk into the viscous mire of the Vasyugan Swamp – the largest in the Northern Hemisphere. People dubbed the planned route of this construction project “the road of death.”
Local historian and Novosibirsk explorer Vyacheslav Karmanov says that Pikhtovka looks as if an apocalypse struck here some forty years ago, forcing everyone to flee their homes. On the bright side, this apocalyptic aura could be an advantage in attracting tourists.
“It wouldn’t cost much,” Karmanov states confidently, “but you could recreate at least part of the camp with barracks, for example. You could recreate a picture of the past right where it happened, so that people don’t forget history’s mistakes.”
For a couple of years, Vyacheslav himself tried organizing excursions to the area, but eventually gave up on the idea. “I didn’t get any support from the local population,” he explains. “And to tell the truth, I got tired of hints that next time we might need to drive home on flat tires. An unfriendly population.”
I was also warned about that before I came to Pikhtovka. Here, more than anywhere else, you can really feel whether you’re one of them or an outsider. They’re very suspicious of outsiders.
A year ago, while passing through Pikhtovka, Vyacheslav Karmanov did a bit of exploring. In the abandoned office of the timber plant, which had holes in the roof and broken windows, he happened upon documents dating back to the Stalin era. He gave this partially disintegrated trove, which included orders issued by the plant and personal case files, to the Kolyvan District archive.
“Most of it was orders issued by the timber plant between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s,” Karmanov said. “There are thick notebooks with personnel records: such-and-such was appointed, so-and-so was replaced. But there were also orders from during the Great Patriotic War. You read it and get a pretty clear picture of things. There’s something about a new shipment of exiles arriving in Kolyvan District and there’s nowhere to put them, so the exiles had to scavenge their own building materials. Or there are orders for everyone to go out as a group: ‘Everyone is ordered to collect rosehips.’ And that was in January! Or something about how people can’t go outside to work because they don’t have warm clothing and they’re asking for warm things, but the response is: everything necessary has been issued. These official documents give you a real sense of what the people went through, how they lived and survived, and not in some faraway place, but right around the corner from us, 100 kilometers from Novosibirsk.”
Karmanov had worried that these records would be classified, but instead they were digitized and made available to the public. However, there hasn’t been much demand for them, as we’re told by the archive’s head, Natalya Khozyaikina: “Usually someone comes, finds the name of their relative in the personnel records of some village in the Pikhtovka Commandant Zone, and that’s all they want. We make a copy for them from the book. But nobody is interested in these [recently found] documents. They have personal case files, people’s ID cards – if someone asks, we’re happy to provide them.”
It is historians who most often want to see the archive. In addition to the personnel records and orders, the collection also includes personal reminiscences and journals. That’s probably the most valuable part of the collection.
One such reminiscence is by Yevdokia Nekrasova, the daughter of a peasant swept up in the anti-kulak campaign in 1930:
We ate through all the greenery: nettles, saltbush, hogweed we ate raw. We were starving and walking around half naked, often barefoot or in bast shoes. Sometimes there wasn’t even a match to light the stove. You’d see if any house had smoke coming out, and you’d go get a coal from them. People looked out for one another, shared their last crust of bread, and now folks have everything, even a television, but they only care about themselves. We went into the collective farm. There was nowhere to sow. We had to pull up the roots by hand in teams of eight to ten people. We had to dig around all the birch trees and then pull them out of the ground using ropes. So many people were killed by birches and aspens! And how much of that land has now been left fallow and filled with weeds? The Pikhtovka hayfields and farmlands are empty. Soon the old folk will die out and the young will scatter to the winds. Back then, the kulaks built the Bakchar Highway with their bare hands. How many died! They say the Bakchar Highway was built on the bones of the kulaks. Our neighbor Petukhov worked on it and came out barely alive.
These recollections were written in 1994. As Natalya Khozyaikina tells us, in the 1990s, the old folks brought their handwritten notebooks to the archive themselves. No new contributions are being added to the archive now. But those still alive and their descendants still remember.
Antonina Romanovna Bessonova is the last surviving resident of Pikhtovka to have experienced forcible resettlement firsthand. She is 86. Bessonova was born in Berezovka, one of the villages no longer shown on maps. Before they were sent to Pikhtovka, her parents had been exiled to Narym, a village in Tomsk Oblast, after her grandfather was declared to be a kulak.
We lived in Udmurtia, in Izhevsk [capital of the Udmurt Soviet Republic]. The chairman of the collective farm summoned my grandfather and said: “Here’s what we’re going to do, Mikhail Nikolayevich. You’re going to be chairman of the collective farm, but for that you have to give your horse to the collective farm, along with your vegetable patch and food supplies – what do you think?” My grandfather responded with an obscene gesture: “You see that?” That evening they came to us with carts. They didn’t give us any time to pack; they took Mama with Papa and Grandma with Grandpa. They put us on a train, in a cattle car, and took us to Narym. Mama had three children: eight, three, and a one-year-old. Mama told how, by the time they took us off the train, she was holding a dead child. He died in that airless car. Lord! They didn’t feed us or give us water the whole time – all we had was what we brought from home. She got off in Narym, and there were no trees, just stone. She buried her boy under those stones on the side of the road. They dug a hole and lay him there…
Antonina Romanovna’s mother fled Narym three times. The third time she was detained in Novosibirsk and sent to Kolyvan District. She liked the taiga village: the earth was warm and soft and there was beautiful forest. But in 1941, Antonina’s father was taken to fight. In 1943 he died outside Leningrad.
“All our Siberian men were taken there. That’s what they say, that if it hadn’t been for the Siberian exiles taken to defend Leningrad, there would have been nobody to defend the city. And they never got out of there.”
Antonina Romanovna remembers how new exiles came flooding into Kolyvan District during the war: Balts, Ukrainians, Belarusians, people from the Caucasus. They were all given help and a place to sleep.
“They were nice families, good kids. But so many of the exiles died! A nightmare! The road they built through Pikhtovka, through Ryamovoye and other villages – you’ve got bridges built not of wood but of human bodies and bones. They died of hunger, of hard work. Mama married my stepfather. She had nine children, but only four of them survived.”
In 1947, the family was allowed to return to Udmurtia, but they decided to stay in Siberia. Antonina Romanovna had finished ten classes in Pikhtovna, entered a construction technical school, and two years later set out for Moscow, where she attended a teacher’s college. After graduating, she still returned to Pikhtovka, “where her heart lay.”
It’s terrible to remember being exiled. I keep asking myself: why do Russians keep killing one another? Back then, our parents suffered, but for us… We didn’t think about the times we were living in. But now we’re starting to understand. The old pages on which our history is written – if we forget that, it will happen all over again. So many died! Why? Why were our parents exiled? They were the kindest of people. But so long as people like me are alive, nothing will be forgotten. Later, people might not remember.”
Lyubov Vasilyevna Ulanova lives in Ponomaryovka. Her family has been buffeted by multiple waves of repression. After being labeled as kulaks, her grandfather’s family was sent from their home in Kolyvan District’s Ust-Toya to Ponomaryovka, where their large extended family still lives.
“People were living literally in the swamps. They made dugouts in the mud and lived in them. They just brought them there: they put grandfather and grandmother and four children in a cart and took them to the swamp. They only had what they’d managed to put on their backs. At least grandpa was a hunter – that’s how they survived. My mother was born here.”
Lyubov Ulanova’s father was 17 when he was exiled. He was sent to Zhirnovka, the swampiest village in all of Kolyvan District.
“My father was exiled from Western Ukraine when he was a young guy. The way he tells it, there was competition over a girl and someone informed on him, claiming that he had been passing out leaflets of a political nature. He spent four years in prison before they sent him to Zhirnovka. He met my mother here. In the 1960s they traveled to Ukraine but didn’t stay there. My father’s thinking was, “This is where I spent my youth, so this is where I’ll live.”
Lyubov Vasilyevna has fond memories of childhood: a large wooden house, cranberry hunting, a large school, and being inducted in the Pioneers. Awareness of what sort of a place she was living in and how her parents got there only came when she was in college.
“When you’re a child, you don’t understand the times you’re living in. They were just destroying people. So many died while working, building roads, building bridges.”
Seventy-five-year-old Nina Davydovna was born in a little village in Kochenyovo District, another part of Novosibirsk Oblast to which exiles were sent. She moved to Kolyvan in the 1970s to go to college and then married there. Her parents are Volga Germans, descended from the Germans who settled Russia’s Volga region in the eighteenth century. Both had lost spouses in exile before marrying one another.
During the war, they were taken from their homes in Saratov Krai. They were brought to Siberia, unloaded, and that was it: live as you like. And people lived out their lives. My mother lost her infant child and then her husband. At one point she worked for the Novosibirsk opera as a stagehand. By some twist of fate, she ran into her sister’s husband there, and he invited her to Kochenyovo District, to their village. As soon as she got there, she met my father. Both of them had children, a total of ten all together. When did they ever have time to talk? They had to work and feed that horde.
At home, Nina Davydovna has a collection of old letters her mother had written in German to her relatives in Kazakhstan. Nina Davydovna herself used to understand the language. She does not remember much anymore, but she does celebrate Catholic Christmas and makes a traditional thick German soup.
“They’re Germans, that means they’re bad.” That’s what she remembers from childhood. “We all played together as kids, but you picked up on that attitude, that we were ‘bad.’ There were only three German families in the village, so people were suspicious of us. They didn’t trust us.”
During the war, her father had been conscripted into the “labor army,” and in 1946 he was forcibly resettled in Kolyvan and prhibited from leaving.
Her memories of those days are full of soggy black bread that was baked out of whatever they could find in hungry Siberia:
“Bitter, bitter bread – you could only eat it with milk. I still remember the poverty, of course. And I remember our first home, a dugout. The windows were at ground level. We moved into a real house only in 1958, when Papa was able to build something.
She knew that she was German from childhood: her classmates reminded her, teasing her and calling her names. But by the time she reached high school the situation had improved and attitudes towards Germans became almost neutral.
Nikolai Vladimirovich Uglov found himself in the Pikhtovka Commandant Zone during the final years of the war. His father, who had been taken prisoner by the Germans, was sentenced to ten years in the Norilsk labor camp, north of the Arctic Circle. His mother and the children were exiled to Pikhtovka from the North Caucasus city of Kislovodsk, where they had been living. Nikolai Vladimirovich was six at the time and his older brother was nine.
Uglov has written several novels about that time, the best known of which is A Salty Childhood in the Zone (Соленое детство в зоне). It tells of the years his family spent in Kolyvan District’s village of Vdovino and in Pikhtovka. They came close to death from hunger and cold during the winter of 1945: he and his mother and brother spent nights in a calf barn and days wandering the area in search of food. To avoid freezing to death, they would bury themselves in haystacks. To avoid starvation, they dug frozen potatoes from the ground and ate dog meat.
Mama was at death’s door, and we also were on our backs, unable to walk. My brother’s teacher saved us – she was a member of the village council. She got Mama into a hospital and Shurka and me into an orphanage. I didn’t even realize I was living in exile. We loved Stalin; we loved Lenin. We started to see the light when Papa’s brother, Uncle Vasya, came to visit toward the end of our exile. He didn’t tell me anything, he just said that our father had unfairly suffered. And after we returned to Kislovodsk I made some friends, and their father turned on Voice of America for me. As I started to listen, my hair stood on end. I thought “What sort of country are we living in?” And in history class I really got bold: I said something to the teacher about Stalin killing millions of people. I got stuck with a C on my report card.
In 1954, Nikolai Vladimirovich returned to Kislovodsk with his mother and brother, but they had to fight to get their home back, since other people were living in it.
Uglov admits that, despite the bitter years spent in exile, he continues to be drawn to this desolate region. He sometimes dreams of the Shegarka River and hears the call of the northern lapwing from the swamp. He has made four trips back to Kolyvan District. When he got to the village of Vdovino, there was nobody living there. He spent the night in an abandoned hut and once found the strength to go to the graveyard, where many of his fellow exiles were buried.
I remember it all: the weather, the guys, the girls, all our hardships and joys, all our games. I also remember my first love. My entire childhood remains in Vdovino, all the best things, although what we didn’t live through – my God!
Uglov says he would like to return to Kolyvan one more time, but he is no longer sure he’ll be able to. And is there any point, if it’s all falling apart?
“Everything is collapsing, the screws are being tightened, like in those accursed times. It’s the same thing all over again: repression has returned. I didn’t think I’d be seeing that in my old age. And Vdovino… What’s going on in Vdovino? There are no roads, no pharmacies, no stores. Can anyone live in such a wasteland? With the mosquitoes, with those long winters? Then again, we lived. We survived.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was nothing to stop Kolyvan District from fading into the past. The narrow-gauged railroad tracks used during the war to ship valuable timber products were removed. The airport was closed – there was nobody to fly. In Vdovino, which had 800 households when people were being exiled, there is now one hermit named Leonid. He reigns over fields of wormwood and nettles stretching to the horizon.
There is a family of eleven living in the village of Khokhlovka. They stock up on food and medicines in the neighboring village. The picturesque village of Novoalexandrovka, which sits on the banks of the Shegarka, now has only two inhabited houses. They can only be reached by boat – there are no roads.
Seventy years ago, there were more than a thousand households in Ponomaryovka. Now there are fewer than 100 people. As Yelena Guseva, head of the village council, explains, there’s nothing to hold people here. The only livelihoods the village offers are the meager salaries of the post office manager, the librarian, the paramedic, the employees of the House of Culture and weather station. There’s also the school, which has more teachers than students. When asked why they stay, one teacher just laughs:
Have you seen the road to get here? There’s your answer. And it’s not that bad, you should have seen what it was like before they repaired it. The fifties and sixties saw the peak of livestock development, and there were all those collective farms… The Ponomaryovka council alone had 50,000 head of cattle! Can you imagine? And now, there aren’t that many in the whole of Kolyvan District. Try getting anyone to live here. Nobody needs us…
* * * *
At one point life here was in full swing – thousands of villagers, crowded schools and collective farms. In a climate of violence and terror, starving exiles built productive communities. Then the wave of repression subsided, the bloodletting stopped, and the cloud of death receded, taking life itself along with it. People scattered, the roads sunk into the swamp, and houses collapsed to the ground. Only memory and the eternal question remain: What was it all for? There is no answer. Only solitary huts, the cranberry bog, and the dark, impenetrable taiga.
This article originally appeared in Takie Dela.
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