Corrective-labour colony No. 11 was based at Lesozavod (Timber mill) settlement from 1936 to 1964. The prisoners were employed felling trees and building a narrow-gauge railway. Those who died were buried in the graveyards of the nearest villages, Bolshie and Malye Kandaly, and in the woods one kilometre to the west of Lesozavod.
Old inhabitants recall that prisoners were first buried in common graves at the Bolshekandaly graveyard; then their graves were moved to an unpopulated area. Local historians estimate that several thousand were interred on the outskirts of the former colony. Today only the traces of a few camp burials survive. In August 2010 the area was studied by journalists from the online magazine, “Ulyanovsk, a City of News”, and they interviewed the inhabitants of neighbouring villages.
A Book in Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression: Ulyanovsk Region (2 vols. 1996 & 2001) contains 13,600 biographical entries for those shot or sent to the Gulag; vol. 2 includes 2,500 entries on Soviet German forced settlers in the region.
State of burials | Area | Boundaries |
---|---|---|
characteristic subsidence
|
not determined
|
not delineated
|
[ Original texts & hyperlinks ]
A. Pavlov, “The Gulag in the forests of the Ulyanovsk Region”, Ulyanovsk, City of News, 3 August 2010 [retrieved, 29 May 2022]
“The Lesnaya Polyana settlement; the Kandalinskoe rural settlement”, Staromainsky municipal district