Press Release, 13.11.2024

Photo: the Zolotaya Gora memorial cemetery in the village of Shershni / Source: Chelyabinsk Yabloko

To commemorate the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions, the Chelyabinsk branch of Yabloko organised a lecture on “The Last Route” of Stalin’s political prisoners.  On 3 November, the listeners of the lecture, together with local historian Yuri Latyshev, walked along the “last route” of those sentenced to death during the Great Terror of 1937-1938 in Chelyabinsk.

The route began at 45 Rossiyskaya Street. Three people sentenced to death for counterrevolutionary activities in 1937-38 lived in the house at this address:

Andrei Kondradt, shop foreman at the Chelyabinsk Electro-Metallurgical Plant;

Nikolai Kushnov, manager of the Chelyabmestpromstroy trust;

Nikolai Sheludyakov, photographer in the club of the Chelyabinsk Electro-Metallurgical Plant.

All the three political prisoners were rehabilitated posthumously.

The route of the lecture participants also lay past the execution chambers at 34 Elkina Street. Now the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Chelyabinsk Region is located here.

The final point of the route was Zolotaya Gora (Golden Mountain), a memorial fraternal cemetery in the village of Shershni on the site of abandoned gold mines. According to available official data, it can be considered one of the most massive burial sites of victims of Stalin’s repressions in Russia. Civil activists made a map with marks of actual and suspected burial sites on Zolotaya Gora.

The Book of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repressions of the State Archives of the Chelyabinsk Region, currently contains 38,680 names of the victims, in addition to the three aforementioned people.

According to the Secretary of the Chelyabinsk Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, Mikhail Solomentsev he released after Joseph Stalin’s death, already in 1956, “in two years (1937-1938), the NKVD Directorate for the Chelyabinsk Region arrested 25,368 people, of whom 14,379 were sentenced to capital punishment {execution}, the rest were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment”.

In 1989, the Chairman of the KGB of the USSR Vladimir Kryuchkov reported to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR that “the NKVD organs repressed 37,041 people in the Chelyabinsk region in 1930-1953”.