[The following is a report that is representative of the practice of completely random detentions and kidnappings common in the Soviet Union, by its government, in the early 1930s.]
One of the rare witnesses who left an account of what happened in Nazino, Ivan Ionovich Ouvarov, tells how he was recruited, at the age of eighteen, as an “assistant accountant” for the Alexandro-Vakhovskaia komandatura:
In 1930, my father, a physician in Krasnodar, decided to visit a comrade at the front with whom he had fought in the Great War, and who had settled in the province of Novosibirsk. My father wore a rather colorful travel getup, in the “Cossack” style: a fine fur trimmed coat, a fur hat of the “Kubanka” type, and a red scarf around his neck. It was this costume that got him into trouble. Near Novosibirsk, chekists in the transportation militia forced him to get off the train on the pretext that he looked “shady.” For a year, my father was moved from one prison to another, without being interrogated or charged. Finally, in 1931, he happened to be in the Tomsk transit camp at the very moment that they were sending thousands of dekulakized persons to the komandaturas in the Narym region. He was assigned, as an escorting physician, to a convoy leaving for Alexandrovskoie, with the status of a special settler. When he arrived in Alexandrovskoie, my father was finally able to write to us for the first time since his arrest. Along with my brother Stepan, we set out to find our father, hoping to convince the local authorities that they had made an error. When we got there, the commander informed us that as “members of a deportee’s family,” we were ourselves henceforth under house arrest, with the status of special settlers. Since I had just completed tenth grade, I was named, as a person who was literate and trained in mathematics, “deputy manager, assistant to the chief accountant” of the komandatura, a certain Kisselev, who was a high-ranking chekist. As for my father, he continued to serve as a physician.
Author’s Note(s):
[In the USSR system at this time, tenth grade was] The equivalent of the senior year in high school.
Ivan Ionych Ouvarov’s account, written in 1988, was deposited in the State Archives of Tomsk Province (GATO), 1933/1/59/2-9.
Source:
Werth, Nicolas. “Negotiations and Preparations.” Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag. Princeton University Press, 2007. 79-80. Print.
Original source Listed:
Nazinskaia tragedia, pp. 191-202.
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