North to Narym

Just over 80 years ago, Joseph Stalin was exiled  to Narym, on Siberia’s Ob river. Recently, Jessica Jacobson retraced his steps, and those of the countless thousands whom Stalin exiled there ...

7:10 am.

In front of the Tomsk riverboat terminal, a dozen or so passengers shiver in a chilly July breeze. They look out onto a smooth, still Tom river and up at a quilted grey sky.

At the captain’s signal, the passengers file down the concrete steps, dragging their plaid, Chinese-made plastic bags. They are mostly village folk, dressed plainly, and they take their places in the old, orange-brown airline seats lining the small speedboat. The boat is known as “the rocket” and it takes passengers up the Tom river to where it intersects with the Ob, then continues north along the Ob, stopping in Narym along the way.

The Ob, one of the three great rivers of Siberia (the other two are the Lena and the Yenisey), begins at the headwaters of the Katun river, near Mongolia, and flows northwest through flat, low-lying land and into the Arctic Ocean. Its power and beauty do not betray its difficult past. Russian explorers plied its waters en route to conquering Siberia; thousands upon thousands of exiles (living and dead) floated down the current; industrialization brought still more darkness, as the river was pumped with an incalculable array of pollutants, from nuclear waste and DDT to human sewage.

The speedboat attendant, dressed in a frilly white apron, shouts out, “Pick up your bags! What if I need to wash the floor? People need to be able to walk freely!”

The engine explodes to a start. It rumbles beneath deck and the water protests when it is pushed to either side, sprays upward, then falls back, pattering like rain.

As the boat pulls out into the river, the water reflects the city along its banks – the dull, concrete buildings and ramparts, the wizened fishermen casting their rods, colorful mechanical cranes, the churning smokestacks of the chemical and nuclear plants.

A woman with bright orange lipstick and smart clothing – an employee of the Yukos oil company – is nothing like the companions Stalin had when he made this trip 82 years ago. Yet, most likely, she and many of the other passengers are taking this river trip thanks to Stalin – the architect of the Soviet Terror Machine that spit their relatives into exile along the Ob.

North of Tomsk, the Ob widens and grows more powerful. Wild, uninhabited land extends from both banks. Low brown crumbling cliffs, willow trees, untouched beaches, and freshly formed clouds repeat in endless patterns.

In an area absent of civilization, the captain docks with another boat to refill his gas tank. As he pulls away and continues north, rainbows extend from the spray of the wake. Eagles soar above in escort.

An Unusual Destination

Ten hours after departing Tomsk, the rocket docks at a grassy bank. Small fishing dinghies ferry passengers across the river to the island village of Narym. In one boat there are just four passengers: a young couple, their baby... and a foreigner.

A foreign tourist is a rare occurrence in Narym. The locals express first surprise, then doubt. The boat driver led me to the Timber Industry Complex, a rickety wooden building situated along the river. Raisa, the 60-year-old weekend caretaker, provided a bed in the worker’s dormitory, treated me to tea and introduced me to the village.

Thirty years ago, Raisa remarried after her first husband was killed. She moved to Narym with her new husband. He drinks and she’s unhappy, but they can’t move. “To get an apartment in Tomsk, we’d need big money,” she said. “And we’re already old.”

Raisa and I walked through the town. Aging wooden homes lined the gravel streets. Most had outhouses and no running water. It was easy to imagine Stalin strolling these same streets, taking in similar sights. In the village center, placards identified homes, indicating which was used as a cafeteria for the prisoners, which a library, and where famous exiles such as Stalin, Kuibyshev, and Yakovlev once resided.

Both Narym’s remoteness and history make it unique. Narym was the center of Narym krai, an area that was larger than Austria, Switzerland and the Czech Republic combined. Narym, which means “swamp” in the Selkup language, was founded as a fort in 1594 in an area populated by Khanty and Selkup tribes. The tsar sent the first exiles there in 1638, beginning a tradition that would span over 350 years. Only Arkhangelsk and Vyatka received more prisoners from the tsars than Narym.

“It’s a special place for prisoners because of the nature here,” said Olga Matushenko, a historian at the Tomsk Regional Museum. “In winter, the temperature drops to  -65o and below. In the summer, it’s covered by swamps and swarms of gnats. For another two months of the year, during spring and autumn, ice floes make it accessible only by plane. Settlements in the area are very far from each other. You can travel 100 km without seeing anything, even today. You can stand on the road all day and no one will pass by.”

Where History Resides

The Museum of Political Exiles, housed in a brightly-painted yellow wooden building, stands out from the dull dirt road like holiday lights on a dying tree. Galina Zubareva, 38, has directed the museum for the past 16 years. When the museum opened in 1948 as a tribute to Stalin, over 4,000 attended the opening ceremonies. In 1960, following the 20th Party Congress, the Stalin Museum was renamed the Museum of Exile. Post-perestroika, with new access to many previously-closed exile files, the museum has again been renamed. Yet information on exiles during the late Communist era is scarce; most of the displays focus on exiles under the tsars and under Stalin.

Stalin came to Narym on July 18, 1912, following an arrest for organizing the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda in St. Petersburg. He traveled north from Tomsk to Narym on the Kolpashevets boat, the same route I had taken. He had been sentenced to three years in exile and boarded in a small wooden home just behind the present-day museum, with a local peasant, Agafya Alekseeva, and her son. On September 1, 1912, less than two months after Stalin arrived (to serve a three-year sentence), Alekseeva’s son transported him to the opposite bank of the river, where he caught a boat to Tyumen. A week and a half later, he was back in St. Petersburg. Years later, Stalin invited his former landlady to Moscow and provided a pension for her son.

Prisoners sent here by the tsar were usually highly-educated bourgeoisie who knew the reasons for their exile. A law prohibited locals from speaking to prisoners, but it was poorly enforced by local authorities. The exiles organized schools, obtained books and made friends, bringing culture and knowledge to the remote area. In 1908, there were 328 prisoners in Narym. This dropped to 25 in 1917 and almost none until 1925.

Beginning in 1930, Stalin sent a massive number of prisoners to the region he’d escaped from. Between 1931 and 1935, according to Zubareva, about 200,000 persons were exiled to Narym. Another wave arrived in the early 1950s, after the end of the Great Patriotic War. Between 1930 and 1989, when the last prisoner left Narym, over 500,000 people had served a term of exile in Narym and the surrounding area.

Prisoners traveled by boat in the summer and by sled in the winter. In tsarist times, Matushenko said, exiles could rent rooms from locals, work, study and read. Many were able to escape. Under Stalin, however, exiles lived in barracks and were forced to work cutting trees or constructing roads. They were prohibited from reading and very few were able to escape the strict security regime.

Nikolai Klyuev, a poet of peasant origins, was sent to Kolpashevo, 600 miles south of the Arctic Circle and just north of Narym, in the 1930s. He wrote, “I have been sent...to the village of Kolpashevo, to a certain and tortured death. Four months of prison and transit-stages...have gnawed me to the bone. Remember me in this hour, an unfortunate, homeless old man of a poet. The sky is in rags, the rain is slanting and flies in from thousands of miles of marshes. The wind is never still and this is what they call summer here. Then follows the minus fifty degree winter, and I am naked. I don’t even have a hat, and my trousers don’t belong to me, because the criminals took all I had in the shared cell.”* Klyuev was shot in 1937.

Remembering Terror

Vasily Khanyevich was born in the village of Belastok, an ethnic Polish village north of Tomsk, in Narym krai. On November 8, 1937 all but one of the men in his village were shot for resisting collectivization. Khanyevich lost two grandfathers, two great-grandfathers and about 40 other relatives. He has written two books about the tragedy, to preserve a period of history that many would prefer to forget. He also now directs The Memorial Museum, located in a dark basement of the former Tomsk NKVD prison, where prisoners were kept from the 1920s to 1944.

The purpose of Narym, Khayevich said, was “to colonize an uninhabited region and to make the government a profit... The state needed the workers’ strength, but it didn’t value individual life.”

A central plan, carried out by the party secretary, prosecutor and NKVD chief, determined how many exiles should be shot and how many sent to labor camps in each region. The plan for the West Siberian krai, which included Narym, called for 5,000 persons to be shot and 12,000 sent to camps. Letters displayed at the Memorial Museum show how a Mr. Gorbach, head of the NKVD of the West Siberian krai, wrote to Stalin on August 15, 1937 and asked that the quota for those to be shot be increased to 8,000. Stalin signed his approval.

In the early 1930’s, some 300,000 exiles were sent to Tomsk oblast. The central government, Khanyevich said, planned to send more than two million. “But local authorities were categorically opposed to this,” Khanyevich said. “They could not physically handle that many people. Many died of cold and hunger.” According to Zubareva, 30 percent of exiles sent to Narym in the 1930s died of disease. Most, she said, especially those repressed under the dreaded Article 58, were poorly educated peasants or workers.

There is a painting hanging in The Memorial Museum, “Narym’s Kuropaty,” by Gennady Sapozhnikov (Kuropaty is the site of a WWII massacre in Belarus), which eerily portrays skulls lining a riverbank. Khanyevich explains. “Besides Tomsk, there was one other place, just south of Narym, called Kolpashevo, where prisoners were shot. Those who were shot were put in large ditches under the NKVD building, without markers. In the 1950s, the NKVD building moved and the river began to erode the banks. In 1979, children found skeletons that had fallen into the Ob river. The remains had been well preserved in the soft sand and locals were able to identify some of the 1,000 bodies by the clothes they were wearing. The Communist leadership brought in ships to open the riverbanks and allow the rest of the skeletons to fall into the water. They kept the locals away, but this artist was in a boat and saw it.”

The Legacy

Today, placards on the main road brag of the Communist dignitaries who once lived in the buildings near the Museum of Political Exiles – Shishkov, Kozhevnikov and Ivanov. Lena and Tanya Mikhanoshiyeva, aged 7 and 14, play with a kitten in their bedroom across the street from the museum. The walls, now plastered with posters of rock stars, were built in 1840. From 1907 to 1911, their home was a cafe and library where exiles congregated. Time slowly erases the signs of bondage and exile, but the exiles’ legacy lives on.

Eighty percent of Narym residents, Zubareva said, are descended from exiles. Boris Sosin, Head of Administration for Narym Oblast, is no exception. His mother came to Narym as a child in the 1930s, when her father was exiled during collectivization. Sosin, 53, was put in office in 1998, by the previous Head of Administration. He will face his first election this year. Dark, trim, and elegant, he works in a bare white office, sitting below a wooden carving commemorating Narym’s 400-year anniversary in 1994.

Sosin said life has improved somewhat in recent years, but the community faces the perennial problems of home repair, rats, unemployment, and the growing difficulty of convincing young people to stay in the village. “The young should do everything themselves,” he exhorted. “When young people come to complain about help with repairs, I tell them to take care of it themselves, even when they say they don’t have any money.”

Sosin pins his hopes on the oil and gas sector, dreaming of the jobs and government revenue that could come to his region if the industry branched out here. But, for now, most of the employed men work for the Narym Timber Industry Complex. Women primarily work as teachers, staff the few stores in town and grow the food that will feed their families. Few employment opportunities has contributed to the population decline. Narym village is currently home to 1,300 people. Just 3,500 live in the Narym okrug.

Rasim Soitov, a 56-year-old Tatar, has directed the local school in Narym for the past 19 years. He wound up in Narym “by accident,” assigned by the Communist Party to teach there. He found he likes the quiet pace of life.

A weathered man, with gold teeth and a wrinkled face, Soitov brimmed with enthusiasm when talking about his large new brick school, the most modern building in the village. After six years of construction, it opened last fall. “We’ll be able to teach better because it will be shameful not to,” Soitov said.

His 280 students and their community shared his enthusiasm. As we spoke, students and community members carted boxes of flower seedlings for planting and worked together to paint the black fence. “I told the students that the school would be finished sooner if they helped,” Soitov said. “They are eager to have their new school and are happy to help.”

Lonely Women

One evening, shop attendant Olga Melnikova gathered with two of her friends on the riverbank, after practicing a skit they’d perform for those celebrating their 25-year high school reunion. Melnikova has lived her entire life in Narym. Thirty-eight years old, she looks more like 50. “I’m an exile,” she said. “Almost everyone here is. My grandparents were sent here in 1937, when my mother was still small. She wasn’t rehabilitated until 1956.”

As an ethnic German, Melnikova could have moved to Germany. But without friends or relatives there, she found the prospect frightening. Both her husband and eldest son have died, leaving her to raise her 12-year-old son alone.

“Things were okay here during Communism,” she said. “We had our own butter from a factory seven kilometers away and we ate our own chicken and beef. Suddenly, one day, it all just fell apart. We eat butter and beef from Holland and chicken from America. Why do we do that? There used to be prospects for youth, but now there is nothing. Those who study can’t find work in their profession.”

Melnikova has little hope that her life will improve, but puts her faith in her son. “I really want my son to study well and to go away to another city. I myself wouldn’t go anywhere – I’ve been here too long – but I want things to be a bit better for him.”

Melnikova reflects a common sentiment in Narym, that their community has been forgotten. “In order for a country to develop, one has to start with the smallest parts, the villages and towns. Only when people are living normally at this level will the country as a whole develop,” Melnikova said.

“We’re lonely women,” her friend said as they locked arms and walked toward their homes. There, vodka and the chatter of friends would carry them through one more quiet, isolated night.

Return to the Mainland

Melnikova and her friends stay in Narym because they lack other options. Or, if options exist, they are too daunting to consider. Like many Narym residents, they were brought here by an accident of history. They now hold out hope that their young will either leave or somehow forge a better life.

When it was time for me to go, I realized just how hard it is to leave this island community, even today. Only a few boats per day make the half hour trip to the mainland and these require advance reservations. It took 24 hours to secure an open seat on a departing boat.

As I stood on the shore and watched each of the four full boats leave without me, I felt frustration, despair and, gradually, resignation. When one has nowhere to go, they can only make the best of their situation.   RL