Press Release, 30.10.2021

Photo by the Press Service of the Kemerovo branch of Yabloko

Members of the Kemerovo branch of the Yabloko party Vitaly Ilyin, Alexander Kalashnik, Svetlana Bondar and Vitaly Bakharev honoured the memory of the victims of the political repressions of 1937 –1938 by laying flowers at the place of execution and mass graves of the repressed in the Yagunovsky residential area of ​​Kemerovo.

During the Great Terror of the 1930s of the 20th century, those sentenced to death in Kuzbass were brought to Kemerovo. From October 1937 to May 1938, the half-constructed Yagunovskaya mine (now the Yagunovskiy residential area of ​​the city of Kemerovo, Bakh street 13) became a “shooting camp”. There were temporary wooden barracks in the area surrounded by a high fence; convicts from the Kemerovo-Sortirovochnaya railway station, as well as prisoners from the Kemerovo prison of the NKVD were convoyed here.

According to eyewitnesses, the prisoners were convoyed here in long columns: the head of the column was at the camp, and the tail was in the village of Komissarovo, two kilometers from the camp. Those who were shot were buried in ditches, and their clothes were burned. The total number of those executed has not been established yet. Until 1947, this place remained closed, later the boards of the fence and barracks were used as building materials during the construction of the mine. After multiple death notes of the victims of the repressions were found on the boards of the barracks, an NKVD group was called the place and burned the remaining boards.

On the initiative of Priest Vladimir Kurlyuta, founder of the Kemerovo Znamensky Cathedral, and Archpriest Alexander Moskalev, rector of the Church of Sergius of Radonezh in the Komissarovo village, a memorial chapel was erected here on public donations in July 1998.