On February 7, the Petrovsky District Court of the Stavropol Territory issued a historic decision: Judge Svetlana Chernovolenko declared the refusal of local authorities to register 71-year-old Nikolai Mikhailovich Mitkin illegal.
It would seem that there is something historical here: an ordinary economic dispute. So the officials, refusing the pensioner, insisted: Mitkin lives in the Perm Territory, he does not have a Stavropol registration — on what basis should he be given an apartment? But outside the brackets of these formal justifications, one completely informal, tragic circumstance remained: 80 years ago, in September 1941, the family of Nikolai Mikhailovich was forcibly evicted from the Stavropol farm Nikolaevka. In one night, without giving even half an hour to get ready. His mother, grandmother and two uncles were taken under escort to the nearest railway station, from there by train to Kazakhstan. In the Akmola region they were separated, and my mother was sent to one of the most terrible camps of the Gulag system — Usollag, to the north of the Kama region. The whole «guilt» of the family was that they were Germans.
80 years after that deportation and 30 years after the collapse of the USSR, it’s even strange to write that this is the first time * when a court in Russia takes the side of the “child of the Gulag” in a dispute with the state and recognizes his right to return to his historical homeland.
Ust-Yazva. Nikolay Mitkin. Photo: Ivan Zhilin/Novaya Gazeta
… Today Nikolai Mikhailovich lives in Ust-Yazva. This is the former camp point of Usollag. A small, only 500 people, dying village on the banks of the Vishera. There is almost no work here: the administration, a school, a post office and a medical and obstetric station, four shops, a sawmill. The nebula of prospects is combined with the nebula of history: when people settled here, no one knows, until 1916 these places were known only as a pier. And it was the Gulag that gave them a “great life”, but what a…
Varlam Shalamov, who spent three years in the Vishera camp, the forerunner of Usollag, for three years (from 1929 to 1931), wrote:
Varlam Shalamov about Vishlag
“I drove through the entire penalty area, the entire northern region of Vishlag — a byword, canonized, approved by human psychology, a threat to everyone, both freemen and prisoners on Vishera, I visited every site where a lumberjack prisoner worked. I didn't find any traces of massacres. <…> And meanwhile these traces were, could not be. After all, the head of the convoy, Shcherbakov, himself stripped me naked and put me on a rack under the rifle of a free chaldon … After all, someone shot those three fugitives, whose corpses — it was winter — frozen, stood near the watch for three whole days, so that the campers were convinced of the futility of the escape. After all, someone gave the order to expose these frozen corpses for teaching? After all, the prisoners were placed — in the same North, which I traveled all over — they were put «on mosquitoes», on a stump naked for refusing to work, for failing to fulfill the production norm.
In Ust-Yazva there was a logging and rafting point Usollag: wood was formed into rafts and sent down the Vishera — to the Kama. Living and working conditions were appalling.
Memories Tobias Boger,
former prisoner of Wischlag:
“Ust-Yazva met with a camp surrounded by barbed wire. The barracks were equipped with three-tier bunks with a terrible amount of bedbugs. They had a conversation with us, broke up in platoons and, under escort, took us into the forest to harvest timber. As shoes, we were given chuni and galoshes made from car tires. When the production norm was met, the Labor Army received rations: 600-700 grams of bread and two meals a day. They tried not to let them out of the forest until the norm was fulfilled. Those who could not meet the norm were given 300 grams of bread. The Labor Army members were mainly residents of the southern regions of the country, and many, especially in the first winter, could not withstand the harsh climate of the Northern Urals. The mortality rate was very high.”
These conditions were used to send Frida Keller, the mother of Nikolai Mikhailovich. And here, in a special settlement at a camp point, he was born.
Nikolai Mitkin in Ust-Yazva. Photo from the family archive
— Mom was 15 years old when the NKVD officers came to them. She said it was at night. They didn’t allow me to pack my things, they just let me get dressed and take my documents,” Nikolai Mikhailovich takes a deep drag on his cigarette. So they drove the whole farm out of their houses that night. Nikolaevka was a purely German settlement, and the Germans, although they lived in Russia for centuries, were then considered “unreliable people.”
Residents of Nikolaevka — about 300 people — were put into horse-drawn carts, taken to the nearest railway station (the pensioner does not remember its name) and sent in a Stolypin carriage into the unknown.
— They were not told where they were going. That this is Kazakhstan, that this is cold — nothing.
Frida Ivanovna still recalled that they were promised to be given the whole economy in the new place: both property and livestock. “So do we,” he says. — They believed it. And then they saw that people were thrown dead from the cars …
And everyone understood,” says Svetlana Mitkina, wife of Nikolai Mikhailovich. class=»SingleImage_caption__2bWvj»>
Workers in Usollag. Frieda Keller is far left. Photos from the family archive
The Germans from Nikolaevka were brought to the Balkashinsky district of the Akmola region and sent to build housing and work in the forest. They were not accused of anything: formally, they were not even in the camp, but in the labor army. Not condemned, but «mobilized». So they worked for two years in Kazakhstan, until in April 1943 additional forces were needed in other parts of the world. Frida Keller was separated from her family. She was taken to Usollag, her older brother Ivan was sent to Udmurtia, her mother and younger brother were left in Kazakhstan.
— Here, in the Urals, mother was brought to the village of Mysya. They settled in a barracks. The task of the Labor Army was to cut and float the wood. The procurement rate is unthinkable — four cubic meters per person per day, — says Nikolai Mikhailovich. — Moreover, the forest had to be not only cut down, but also taken out on horseback. Through the mud, damp: she always remembered that even the clothes from such work were wet and did not have time to dry out overnight. At the same time, they fed meagerly: rutabaga, beets, bread.
“Mom told how with other Labor Army members she collected potato peelings thrown out by the camp guards: the Labor Army members made soup from them, and those peelings on which there were sprouts were planted, and by autumn small fruits grew from them” .