In 1949-1957 a sub-division of Indigirlag was based near the settlement. The transit camp and Indigirlag hospital were several kilometres from Ust-Nera. Prisoners who died in the hospital were buried in the camp cemetery. The exact numbers buried there is unknown.
In 2001 a memorial to victims of repression in the form of a wooden cross on a cairn (designer B. Sateyev) was established in the cemetery, thanks to the efforts of Ye.I. Archakovaya, director of the Ust-Nera Museum and chairman of the local Memorial society. The plaque quotes from the Gospels (Luke 23: 33-34): “And when they came to Golgotha, they crucified him […] and Jesus said, ‘Father! Forgive them for they know not what they do’”.
The surface of the road to the burials has been levelled and lined with stones from the mounds where the prisoners worked. The cross was made from a trunk used to build one of the camp barracks and is wound about with barbed wire taken from the fence of the outpost.
NOTE The Gospel quotation is incomplete: the words “… they crucified him” are followed by the phrase “and the criminals with him, one on the right and the other on the left”.
Information about some deceased Gulag inmates can be found in Memorial’s Victims of Political Terror database with its 3 million entries, or in the Open List database (“Victims of Political Repression in the USSR, 1917-1991”).
| State of burials | Area | Boundaries |
|---|---|---|
|
have not survived
|
not determined
|
not delineated
|
[ original texts and hyperlinks ]
“Pupils from the Ust-Nera gymnasium have honoured the memory of the victims of political repression”, Bezformata.ru (Yakutsk)
O. Petrovskaya, “The wheel of repression in popular memory”, Yakutia (Yakutsk), 5 November 2010
