"You Will Live Here Forever"

The Life of Wilhelm Fast – Son of an 'Enemy of the People,' Street Sweeper, Scholar and Human Rights Defender

The Soviet state had many names for Wilhelm Fast.

First, he was a "son of an enemy of the people," born to a family of deported ethnic Germans. Later, he became an "immoral scholar" after he refused to cooperate with the KGB and testify against his friends in court. He was fired from his university post and spent seven years sweeping streets.

No janitor in Tomsk was ever as respected as Fast. Those years became the period of his greatest renown.

Childhood Under Stalin

Fast was born in 1936 into a Volga German family whose ancestors had settled along the Volga River in the eighteenth century at the invitation of Catherine the Great. By the 1930s, nearly half a million of their descendants lived in the Volga region, the geographic enclave allowing them to preserve their language, culture and national identity.

In 1938, when Fast was two years old, Soviet authorities arrested his father and grandfather and sentenced each to 10 years in labor camps. The family were kept entirely in the dark about their fates. Fast’s mother, Elena, traveled to the city – dozens of miles – several times to deliver packages, only to be turned away at the prison gates.

“All day I stood uselessly at the prison gates and then returned home with the package unaccepted," she wrote in her memoirs. "I made my last such trip on Dec. 9. It was already very cold. It turned out that, by that time, they had already been sent further away, and we knew nothing of it. My heart was breaking with grief."

His father managed to send home one letter from the camp. Prisoners were forbidden from disclosing their sentences, so he devised a workaround, opening the letter with the words: "Goodbye, my twelve-year-old Willi." The family understood: he had received ten years.

After the arrests, the Fast family members who remained free lived on the verge of starvation. Fast's younger sister died of illness and malnutrition at two, never having seen her father.

When the Soviet Union entered World War II, the government ordered the mass deportation of all Volga Germans to Central Asia, branding an entire people as untrustworthy and accusing them of secret sympathies toward Hitler. "Within three days the entire German population of the settlement was removed with just a few belongings,” Fast’s mother wrote. “Everyone tried to take as much food as possible, but it quickly ran out. On arrival, the entire train was unloaded. Several corpses were taken out and buried. We were taken by sled to villages and collective farms. By that point, many were already suffering badly from hunger. We were allowed to enter a Kazakh hut where hot soup was ready, which warmed us."

That is how Wilhelm and his mother ended up in Kazakhstan. His mother was sent to log timber, while he, at age 5, was placed in an orphanage. “As we were gathering our meager belongings,” Elena wrote, “my child stood beside me and said: ‘Mama, take me with you so we can die together!’ How those words echoed like a knife in my heart."

Wilhelm later ran away from the orphanage and tried to find his mother, living on the street. She didn’t know about this and had no contact with her son. Only four years later was she able to come for him and take him away, setting off together for Novosibirsk Oblast in search of his father, who was serving out his post-camp exile there. The entire family was permitted to remain in Siberia as permanent exiles.

When young Wilhelm Fast stopped at the local state security office to register his arrival, he asked how permanent exile differed from a life sentence. The answer was: "Permanent means that you will live here, and your children will live here, and your children's children will live here – forever."

Fast graduated from high school with a gold medal, but issuing medals to children of enemies of the people was not permitted. To resolve the situation, the school administration altered the already-completed transcript, changing his top grade in Russian to a passing one. But that did not stop Wilhelm, who dreamed of becoming an astronomer, from enrolling in the mathematics and mechanics faculty at Tomsk University.

At that time, an expedition was being organized in Tomsk to study the Tunguska meteorite. Fast devoted many years of his scientific career to studying the mysterious event, trying to determine what actually happened there. In 1908, the shockwave from the atmospheric explosion over Eastern Siberia was even recorded in Europe, but the object itself disappeared into the atmosphere without a trace, and science still does not have answers to all the questions.

Fast and his like-minded colleagues organized several expeditions into the Tunguska taiga at their own expense. His master’s (“kandidat”) dissertation was based on his analysis of the forest flattened in the disaster zone.

The Samizdat Case

Following his work on Tunguska, Fast began working toward his doctoral dissertation. He organized several expeditions to the Taimyr Peninsula and Western Siberia and published more than 70 scientific papers on collisions between cosmic bodies and Earth. But a KGB trial got in the way.

Fast was swept up in what became known as “The Samizdaters" trial in Tomsk. Samizdat literally means “self-publishing” – surreptitiously duplicating and distributing uncensored work by writers banned in the USSR: Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, Brodsky, Orwell and others. The KGB sought, but was unable to find sufficient incriminating evidence against Fast, yet he was designated a witness in the case, while many of his acquaintances ended up in the dock. Fast refused to cooperate with the investigation or provide any testimony for the prosecution. "My friends may have faults,” he declared, “but I can tell them so myself — not through the KGB."

Investigators characterized Fast’s words as "an unprincipled assessment of the anti-Soviet activities of his friends" and demanded that the university administration dismiss him. At first this was attempted by accusing him of professional incompetence. A review committee was appointed, but the committee examined his teaching and concluded that he delivered his lectures at a very high level.

Fast was then called to account for how he had once refused to deliver an anti-religion lecture to students, how he had ignored an election of people's judges, and the fact that a photograph of astrophysicist Kronid Lyubarsky – sentenced to five years for dissident activity – hung prominently in his office. In the end, in 1982, Fast was dismissed as "an immoral employee incapable of educating the younger generation in the spirit of Communist ideals."

"I Collected 26 Boxes of Human Bones"

With such a black mark on his record, the only job Fast could find was sweeping streets (it was illegal during the Soviet era to not work if you were able-bodied). Fast ultimately worked as a janitor for seven years. But it was during those years that his true renown grew among Tomsk's intelligentsia as the scholar who had refused to inform on his comrades. People began turning to Fast for advice and heeding his views on important public matters. Tomsk residents jokingly called him "the righteous one" and "a knight of justice." What's more, the newly minted Fast the janitor was far bolder and sharper in his statements than Fast the associate professor had ever been able to be. He had, by his own account, nothing left to lose.

By the start of perestroika, Fast commanded unquestioned authority in Tomsk's democratic movement. When changes began sweeping the country, he became co-chairman of the Tomsk chapter of Memorial and took up the work of restoring the historical memory of Stalin-era repression victims. In 1989, Fast was reinstated to his position at Tomsk University and elected a deputy to the Tomsk Regional Soviet. From the floor of the legislature, he called on Soviet society to embrace democratic change without delay.

In 1993, Fast was appointed chairman of the Tomsk Regional Commission for the Rehabilitation, Protection and Assistance of Those Who Were Repressed. Over ten years of the commission's work, it reviewed several thousand cases, helping people restore their good names and obtain justice. At Fast's request, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, before leaving for his exile in the West, donated money to provide material assistance to repressed Tomsk residents who had fallen on hard times.

In his new role, Fast undertook the search for burial sites of Stalin-era terror victims. He located mass graves near the city of Kolpashevo and on Kashtak Hill in Tomsk. When he learned that residents digging basements on Kashtak were finding bones and discarding them in a ravine, he personally traveled to the site, collected 26 boxes of human bones and had them reburied in the city cemetery. (Historians later established that up to 40,000 souls were murdered and buried on Kashtak Hill. Today one of the most densely populated apartment regions rests atop the hill.)

Fast was the first to investigate the events of the Nazino tragedy. Nazino is an uninhabited island in the middle of the Ob River in northern Tomsk Oblast. In 1933, Soviet authorities brought more than 6,000 dispossessed peasants to the island, ostensibly "for resettlement." The settlers were left without food, tools or shelter. In just four months, hunger, disease and executions reduced the island's population by two-thirds.

Fast continued his human rights work until the end of his life. He died in Tomsk in 2005 at the age of 68. When recalling him, many of his colleagues called him "The Salt of the Russian Earth."

This article was published as part of the "Last Witness" project, produced in collaboration with the Tomsk Museum "NKVD Investigation Prison." It was originally published in Russian by Lyudi Baikala.