SUMMARY OF MEMOIRS - Part A
In the spring of 1954, a new worker, who had previously served as a
radio operator
aboard fishing vessels belonging to the Far Eastern Flotilla, arrived at
the Leningrad Gold-
prospecting Brigade in Partizanskit (Udereslu District, Krasnoyarskii
Region). He recounted
that, in n n
when he was fishing some forty miles from the Island of Okusiri
in the
Sea of Japan, he "forced his way into" discussions about
a certain aircraft that had crashed
Within a few minutes, a "radio message" arrived from the base
of the Trawler Fleet, stating that
all vessels belonging to the flotilla were to commence at once a search
for the crewmembers.
Immediately thereafter, an encoded message arrived from the base's
deputy political officer
directing that the "enemy spy pilots," or their corpses, if
they were found, be brought at once
"under the strictest secrecy" to the coast guard ships
belonging to the Border Patrol Just one
point was not clear From whom was this "strictest of secrets"
being kept? From the fishermen
of an enormous flotilla scattered across the oceans and seas-who were
supposed to be the ones
searching for those involved in the crash?
For days, it seemed that the entire communications
network was saturated with transmissions by crews of the search
aircraft Then, suddenly,
everything went silent
A
week later, we radio operators were informed in the Port of Ol'ga
that an American
military spy plane had been downed over our territorial waters by air
defense (PVO) units, had
fallen into the sea and that the entire crew had
perished Why were they so incredibly
quick to
bury the Americans, who, unlike our pilots and sailors, had top-quality
personal rescue gear? .
Two months later, the captain of the fishing vessel on which the
worker served served, returned
from Khabarovsk (He had been visiting with his sister there ) He
told the radio operator that not
all the crew members of the "American" [aircraft) had,
in fact, died "back then" (in June) and that
ten of those people were now in pre-trial solitary confinement in
a prison in the city of
Svobodnyi, near Blagoveshchensk To keep them
away from curiosity seekers, they were
transferred there immediately from the internal prison of the Khabarovsk
MGB [i e , Ministry of
State Security, predecessor organization of the KGB, trans
] The worker added that his captain
was unfazed by this and that he knows the truth -- His sister was
married to "just about the most
prominent figure in the Khabarovsk Regional Committee" [of
the Communist Party, trans] In
reply to the worker's question, "What happens now"," the
captain answered.
"They will be squeezed for what is required And, of course, they
will finish them off
They'll be worked to the bone and shipped
off to Zeya and not for the first time
Svoboduyi is where they have their principal drowning
base In echelons, straight from the
trains, they had been drowning people for thirty years like
nothing And that's all They
definitely will be counted in all the docunents as having
drowned See, even TASS made the
announcement: They fell, as it were, into the sea"
The report alarmed me a great deal
In the very beginning of 1953, a courier from the Udereiskii Regional
KGB
summoned me to the Nizhne-Angarskoe Geological Reconnaissance
Directorate in Motygino
I was informed that, at the direction of the senior geologist,
Ivanchenko, I was being sent
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to handle an emergency situation at the Northern mining
enterprise On that same day, with an
escort and two geologists, we flew off to Krasnoyarsk
We were met there by representatives of
the director of the Regional GRU He reported that,
together with other specialists, I was to fly to
the north, where a ChP (Extraordinary Event) took place at one of
the enterprises constituting the
"integrated system" A crust of ice within
the ground had burst apart and flooded the area of the
elevator Responding to my retort that I lacked the proper
educational background, and, therefore,
the results of my expertise (or my suppositions) would be considered
incorrect. He waved in
front of my face a thick folder with my "Personal File
"
the discussion, he
announced, "Around here what matters we not your diplomas but your
actions! Don't get
gloomy, young man Go! You do your work and I'll worry
about freeing you from exile. . ."
The following day - it was January 8th - along with two
geologists from Motygine and
another three specialist from the "26th [Post Office] Box, (Krasnoyorsk),
we flew out toward the
Island of Dikson. (approximately 2,000 kilometers to the north of
Krasnoyarsk) Two or three
days later -- there was a blizzard and the airports were closed -- we
flew for about three hours to
the village of Solnechnyi (?) on Bol'shevik (an island in
the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago)
There we once again "sat" because of the weather
Finally, after flying across the Vil'kitskn
Gulf, we landed in the tundra, some 160 kilometers from Chelyuskin
Bay The site was called
"Rybak"
It was inmates who worked here at the mining enterprise since the camp
was right next to
the mine The reason for the emergency situation -- an
ignorance of elementary engineering --
could have been clarified without having to fly out to the
site Its consequences could have been
eliminated as well by instruction from a competent
engineer What was needed were experienced
pyrotechnic specialists and demolition experts And they sent us a
demolition-qualified inmate
tall, exhausted by hunger and the Artic, with a very characteristic,
slightly elongated artistic face
on which the unnatural protrusion of gray eyes in sockets sunken from
emaciation revealed
someone ill with exophthalmos goiter In an accent
clearly that of an English speaker, he also
only identified himself as a citizen of the United States of America,
Allied Officer Dale
His
statement did not appear to make any impression on my
colleagues In fact, on the return trip,
already in Krasnoyarsk, one of them heard me say "Tell me,
please An American! An ally
And also in the
camp" He
retorted "And they're not only in Rybak You
have as many as
you want of them in Strelka! So much for our
'so-called allies'"
Somewhat later, after having returned to Udereya, I asked those
who had escaped from
Strelka about our "allies" Yes, they knew about
the Americans, but they had no contact with
them From the very moment of their arrival on the territory of the
Enterprise, they were all kept
in isolation
I
was unable to converse with the American prisoner Dale The
camp guards
"monitored" me very closely Even before we entered his area, I
and all the others were warned
that it was strictly forbidden to speak with anyone!
Six days later, we flew to Dikson Only then did I learn that we
were in a uranium mine
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In
Kranoyarsk I was compelled to sign a non-disclosure statement
with regard to
everything that I had seen and heard in Rybak
In Noril'sk, many years later, a colleague who
had worked with me in Udereya at the time in question, related
that many of the Americans "who
had fallen into our hands in 1945 from the liberated Fascist camps"
were held in Rybak and
probably perished there. "
My status as an exile did not permit me to clarify anything at all about
those Americans
who were alive from the aircraft downed in the Far
East This applied even in the case of those
Americans who were located much closer -- in Rybak or in Strelka
But at least in the case
of Rybak I had a chance to see one of them with my very own
eyes! I could also not but believe
those who fled from Strelka, who trusted me with their lives, and
who understood perfectly the
price of such information
But then, in Udereya, my sad experience showed that the
"flow" of Americans from
the prisoner of war camps in Germany and in the Far East, and now from
Korea was proceeding
at a robust pace, filling in the bottomless hell of the GULag
I first met these people in Peveka
There, in the region to which I was sent after the hospital (as a result
of an accident in "Zemlya
Bunga") four Americans, specialists in automation
systems, were being detained They were
sent
there from the mining camps of the Northwestern Directorate of Sevvostlag
to delve into the
functionality of mobile electric power stations that reached Chaunskaya
Guba under the Lend-
Lease program . Later, at the very beginning of
navigation in the Sea of Okhotsk, I met a still
another group of Americans in the summer of 1948, at the Magadan
transfer point in the Bay of
Nagaev There were 14 of them and they had just
been taken from the holds of a ship
transporting slaves: helpless, enfeebled by a week-and-a-half's
worth of tossing on the seas,
hunger, exhaustion, and desperation I cannot single
out anyone of them They all appeared
uniformly lifeless and faceless But I recall how many of
them there were and the number of their brigade
"1014." I recall the name of their brigade leader Geldol'f
He, too, was
indistinguishable from the others, except, perhaps, by his
height He was tall and, for a tall
person, very round-shouldered. It is difficult for me
to remember anyone's individual features,
anyone's eyes, because in enormous barracks with three levels of wooden
cots it was dark and
hazy, as in a crypt What I
also recall is the physical appearance and name of the American
doctor in the group of fourteen, a small but thick-boned fellow named Gertsige
And this is all that I can recall about the meeting in the Bay of
Nagnev
Both the brigade leader and the doctor knew a bit of German. They
said that they had
served with the navy somewhere out at
sea There they were seized by the
Japanese in 1943
They were detained in camps, first in the Philippines (?), then in Manchuria,
outside of Harbin,
where they were duped by Soviet "liberators "
There was very little opportunity to communicate
with them One night they were taken off to the depths of Kolyma,
into the bottomless abyss
of its vastness We were incomparably better
off A week later we were loaded into the hold of a
military transport heading into the Bay of Vanin, toward
construction site "501" . .
Just to finish this point I did not have any direct contact with
Americans in Peveka I
saw them several times as they were taken by convoy to and from the
port But a doctor from
Leningrad told me about them on numerous occasions The
doctor even provided the names of
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two of them Filipp (Pill') Etth and Frederkink (or
Frederling). I might be in error here That is
all
During
the latter half of the 1960s, I once again had occasion to hear about
the fate of the
crewmembers aboard the American plane downed in the Far East in
June(?)1952 I was called
upon to fly out to Komsomol'sk-na-Amure on a business trip with
the deputy director of my
institute.
"those" years this fellow was the director of DAL'STROL,
i e , from the viewpoint of the Nurenberg charge sheet, he was a war
criminal of the first order
and then, in a moment of particularly "sincere closeness," I
made my decision
He was not in the least surprised by my question He
replied at once
"Yes, at first ten people were alive. Yes,
first they were brought to Khabarovsk
But, then, of
course, they were sent off to Svobodnyi
They were to have been met by people
from the Ministry of
Defense They were
not met, though You see, there was some screw-up
in Moscow Well, I can tell you that they
were not met What happened to them after that, I do
not know And I would advise you not to know as
well Let the leadership
worry itself about
it "
Later
that very same year, in Murmansk, an acquaintance who was a
friend and
erstwhile colleague of the Deputy Director "throughout the Far
East," repeated almost word-for-
word the testimony of the former DAL'STROI director but went on
to clarify "The guys from
within 'worked over' the Americans so badly that only eight were take
.And
those had nowhere to go after all
that. And so what? Do
know what sort of arrogance they
had? They were Americans! You understand
!!!"
"They probably drowned them," I offered as a supposition
"Well, well! And how did you find that out? He probably bared his
soul to you,
right?"
In 1973, I had my birthday celebration, to which I invited only my
closest friends The
group included the husband of my classmate He was a
general with an outstanding service
record.
Much was said over 19 years of complete mutual trust and
affection While
accompanying the general after an evening at our home, I decided to ask
him whether he knew
anything about "those" Americans [His reply ]
"I know only that they did not come over our way If that had
been the case, they would be alive
and healthy And, by now, they would have been back home for
a long time, across the ocean. I
know that Zhukov was aware of the extraordinary event (ChP)
that occurred in the summer of
1952. I know that Zbukov immediately contacted Stalin
directly with a request that be involve
himself in the fate of the American pilots, who as he understood, were
lusted from the very
beginning as having perished But neither Stalin nor his
underlings responded to the disgraced
marshal. Lastly, I know that, as soon as he became deputy minister
of defense in 1953, the
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SUMMARY OF MEMOIRS - Part B
In the fall of 1951, a group of American - POWs (?) from Korea (7)
arrived at the
Kirovskij mining camp, Uderejskij administrative
district, Krasnoyarsk region
However, in the beginning of 1952, they disappeared without
trace In any case, during
the liquidation of the prison camp during the winter of 1951 and into
1952, none of them
were among the frost bitten prisoners, who were marched in column to Motygmo
(in the
south part of the region) and offered medical assistance
A worker
from Kirovskij, a deportee, witnessed how "late at night, on
Russian
Christmas, a group of approximately 20 persons, maybe slightly more,
were led from
the camp along the Venisminovkij road [note the road connecting
the town of Kirovsk and
Venisminevskij] "
The deportee's daughter and her friend, a Cossack, witnessed that during
the last
days of December 1951 "more than 20 prisoners, wearing bare threads
and half frozen,
were moved along the road to Veniaminovkij "
The daughter of the manager of Veniaminovkij, stated that
"on Christmas we
were given a present; frost bitten prisoners being led and driven like
cattle by the NKVD
They did not speak Russian They only said "American,
American" and "eat, eat" They
wanted food Then, in the morning, around 6o'clock, they were marched
away to
somewhere further However, further lies only a wasteland, mountainous,
desolate and
uninhabited, the taiga a dead-end
A driver
and hunter from village of Chinuel, observed from his car,
prisoners of
some sort that were speaking, but not in Russian, coming at him and
being marched
passed his car along the road The guards were trying to
prevent the prisoners from
talking This was early in the morning, on Christmas He
could not understand why
prisoners were being marched on a holiday(?) Why to the north? There is
nothing
there, there is no work for them to do
That evening, when he returned to his home in Chinuel, the column
was passing
the mouth of the Ishimbi River
it seemed, towards him, to Chinuel itself
The next day, around 7am he was going back to Kirovsk when he
again encountered the
same column of prisoners, having t h i n n e d o u
t
It was approaching the
town of Kameaka, nearing the river.
Yet another witness He worked as a dredge operator at the Kirovskij
mine
In February 1952, while hunting in the lower reaches of the
Parenda, where it empties into
the Kwnenka river, he happened upon small clearing already slightly
covered with snow
For some reason it had been covered over with beams of logs The dogs
immediately
were aroused. They dragged out some type of boot - worn out at the heel
, slippers and
even a shoe, resembling American shoes by the - copper
nails Forcing him to put on his
glasses, in disbelief as to what they had in their teeth.
He had heard
rumors and became quite nervous. Especially disturbing to him was
the behavior of his dogs They were nervous, whimpering, scratching at
the snow and
barking in a manner unlike any that they had before on the hunt. He
tried to dig up the
ground - covered in a half meter of snow
Suddenly, the snow was up to his waist But
beneath, the ground was already frozen although, clearly the ground had
been turned-up
and filled back in It was obvious that someone had been buried here and
the dogs began
to back up and howl like near a corpse...
He stopped
tempting fate, - left The hunt was over
A week later,
he met with his friend, who worked for the militia. His friend
recommended he keep quiet for God's sake...
In July
1952, my friend and I, based on this information, tried to locate that
clearing However, the swamp had flooded over.
In the
fall, we again began to search But, we had been
"sold-out" We were
questioned by the police and held for ten days in detention
In the
1960s, I again tried to locate this burial site
However, the taiga had
completely grown over it I was assisted by very kind people.
Again, someone did not
like my search Just like the incident of the shooting of the
Americans in Bodajbo, in
Moscow, again to the, prosecutor's office, USSR (local Government
District Attorney's
office) the official car arrived . .
Then, in August 1964, I officially requested from Krasnoyarsk . .
"as to the fate of
American prisoners of war at the Krovskij mining camp " But of
course I did not receive
a reply So, I then submitted a letter to the USSR prosecutor's office
itself However, the
reply was not from Pushkinskij, but from Kuovskij - from the military
prosecutor's
office In the reply, on a carbon copy, it stated
"...regarding the fates of citizens of the
USA, held at the Kirovskij Springtime camp, the
Prosecutor of the Krasnoyarsk region
has no information "
The Prosecutor, USSR, through the military forced the regional
Krasnoyarsk, to
reply That reply stated there were such persons,
however, we do not know where they
were taken.
A list was compiled by a woman containing 22 names of citizens of the
USA
imprisoned in the Kirovskij camp during the winter of 1951 to
1952. When this person
arrived at Kirovskij, she worked as a sanitation worker Part
of her duties included
cleaning toilets at the camp She put the list together over
a months time It is not
complete, since she was not able to ask anyone for help
During ten years of repression even she herself had forgotten about
this Because
she is alone, in an exile brought about from working in the zone of the
camp
By
1951, this once slim figured, fan-haired, gray-eyed beauty had turned
into an
old woman But, to this "old woman" I devoted
to my investigative work She was able
to recall and "Shed light on everything" She was
able to record only 22 names
of Americans, as she was being carefully watched She was not
even able to get their first
names One day, she managed to sneak a pencil in, broke it
into pieces and handed them
out to the Americans so they could record their names and addresses on
pieces of
newspaper Several days later, she smuggled them out, covered
in filth, in a canvas bag
She cleaned them, dried them, placed them in a empty fruit jar, and
buried them
During Christmas of that year, when the Americans were being marched to
north
toward Veniaminovkij, she disappeared without a trace, just like the
Americans And I
remain, still hopeful of finding this glass jar
[script]
2 Sep 1979
Moscow
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SUMMARY OF MEMOIRS - Part C
TESTIMONY
At the end of June -
beginning of July 194 1, during the massive repression against
prisoners by the NKVD (town of Kuybishev), many foreigners were
executed In July
1943, there was another wave of and executions, except now it was
against foreign
specialists (a list of l38 names,who were executed in
l941) I found myself in the town
of Kuybishev, and I found out the reason for the executions
Counterintelligence "SMERSH"
(headed by Abakymov), during this period
"cleansed" the areas of any unnecessary specialists -
Americans and Swedes, that were
utilized from 1936 for the construction of underground industrial
complex by the
Shiguiev Mountains (on the right bank of the Volga River,
opposite the town of
Kuybishey)
All of them were recruited by Soviet
representatives in Germany and Great Britain,
and according to the official paperwork worked in "Third World
countries" Once the
contract was formed, their fates were sealed The head
of "recruitment" of foreign
specialists was Leonid Skoblinskiy, who until 1929 was the
head of the political section
of the VChK-OGPY predecessor to the NKVD) In the 1930s, he was the
secretary of
the Party Bureau of the Soviet Bank in Paris And, during 1941 - 1943,
under the cover
of [WWII], SMERSH "finished" its dealings with the Americans
and Swedes. They
were killed in the transportation tunnels that were labeled "Liter
Zero One " [After the
executions) they were taken out of the tunnels and buried near
cemeteries of the German
POW camps The actual cemetery was located of the south
border of the "industrial
zone" of the Separate Labor Point No 5 in Kpaishe (in the
area of the Kuybishev
railroad)
From May 1941 till November 1943, I was a
prisoner and worked in the complex
"Liter Zero One." I knew very well what was
happening during that tune. A witness to
all the crimes was my foreman Somehow he escaped the
liquidation Another witness
who informed us of everything that went on in these tunnels I had a list
of the executed
Americans and Swedes, that was prepared by my comrades [who were
killed] But in
November 1943, this list was lost possibly, the area where the Americans
and Swedes
were buried is still open (i.e free from construction) This
area was "free' in 1957, when
I visited it in search of witnesses
[signature]
16 November 1961
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