KARGOPOL CAMP:

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On the shores of Lake Lacha, amidst the ancient pines of Arkhangelsk land, a machinery of destruction emerged in August 1937, disguised as a "timber enterprise." The Kargopol Corrective Labor Camp (Kargopollag) was not merely a point on the Gulag map. It was a death factory, where over 23 years (1937–1960), tens of thousands of lives were ground into sawdust to supply Moscow with lumber and military plants with cellulose. Its creation epitomized Stalinist logic: on 16 August 1937, by order of NKVD chief V.F. Dementyev, the camp was established within the walls of the abolished Dormition Convent in Kargopol — as if mocking the very concept of holiness.

The first prisoner transports arrived in September 1937. By early 1938, the camp held 15,217 inmates, peaking in 1941 at 25,218 souls — 90% "counter-revolutionaries": priests, "kulak" peasants, intellectuals, Poles, Balts, and Western Ukrainians. The camp split into two monsters:

Kargopol Division — forest tracts near Lake Lacha, where zeks felled pines for Moscow’s firewood;

Yertsevo Division — lethal swamps near Yertsevo station, where prisoners built railways to logging sites.

In 1940, headquarters shifted to Yertsevo — a symbol of the system’s "progress": the camp expanded while its administrators settled in barracks built on bones. Prisoners called this settlement "the gates to perdition": winter temperatures plunged to -45°C, summer swarms of midges devoured the living, and logging quotas (5 m³ of wood per person) left no chance for survival. "Locals envied us — at least the camp gave bread," wrote philosopher Yelizar Meletinsky, imprisoned here in the 1950s.

Kargopollag’s core mission: feed the nation’s timber hunger at any cost. NKVD reports coldly recorded:

Annual logging: 1.2 million cubic meters;

Construction of a cellulose plant on the Voloshka River (Workshop No. 5), producing gunpowder materials;

Manufacturing skis for the Red Army — 300 pairs daily.

But numbers hid monstrous reality. Prisoners worked 14-hour days in rotting cloth uniforms, fed "gruel" of spoiled cabbage and 300g of bread. In 1944, only 52% of inmates were deemed "fit for labor" — the rest were "goners" with weeks to live. Mortality reached 40% in the winter of 1943–1944 — men froze beside logs, their bodies stacked like firewood until spring thaw allowed swamp burials.

Special cruelty reigned during the construction of the Puksa–Yertsevo narrow-gauge railway. Prisoners were driven into frost without mittens — those too weak to hold axes licked the metal, their tongues freezing to the rails. "Our foreman, an ex-chekist, shot three for failing quotas. Said: ‘Corpses are more useful — at least they won’t sink in swamps,’" recalled Pole Tadeusz Skrochaczewski, who miraculously survived here in 1942.

Kargopollag’s prisoners embodied Stalinist terror:

"National traitors" — 7,000 Poles, 3,200 Balts after the 1940 annexation;

Clergy — Archimandrite Ioann Krestyankin (future saint), Bishop Arkady Ostalsky (executed 1937);

Intelligentsia — screenwriter Valery Frid (future co-author of Heart of a Dog), poet Yuri Lyuba, who wrote verses in charcoal on wooden planks.

Polish teacher Julius Margolin, arriving in 1941, described the dehumanization ritual: "They forced us to strip naked at the gates. Our clothes were steamed; we got uniforms with numbers instead of names. A guard screamed: ‘Forget who you are! You’re splinters for the great Stalin!’" Children of "enemies" became system ghosts — like Lidia from Fatyankovo village, left with "hungry children and bare walls" after her father’s arrest.

After the camp closed in 1960, its history was buried under lies of "rehabilitation." Only in the 1980s did teacher Svetlana Ikonnikova begin collecting testimonies, uncovering mass graves near Lipovo station: "Pits lined with stones, no crosses. Locals said: ‘Your enemies lie there.’" In 2003, near Kovzha village, searchers found 70 skeletons with execution-style bullet wounds — but the FSB refused to declassify archives.

Today, former camp zones host dachas and resorts. Yertsevo opened a museum displaying prisoner photos alongside portraits of guards. At Kargopol’s School No. 3 stands a modest monument: "To Victims of Repressions" — cleaned by students whose great-grandfathers may have been killers or victims. As survivor Yuri Lyuba wrote: