Serpantinka

Serpantinka is the informal name for the place of detention and execution at the times of Stalinism. Though never officially found by any expedition it is conjectured to have been located somewhere in the Kolyma region. Validity of Ivan Panikratov's assertion of the existence of Serpantinka has been repeatedly questioned.

Background

In the early thirties, the Soviet leadership decided to start accelerated development of the Kolyma River basin in a very remote and sparsely populated region in the north-east of the USSR, where rich deposits of gold and tin were found. To accomplish this task, a "special type industrial complex" was created, known under the abbreviation "Dalstroy". An important role in these plans was played by the so-called Corrective labor camps, where prisoners had to work in extremely severe conditions. These camps in the Kolyma region were under the control of Sevvostlag, which was only formally subordinate to the 'Main Directorate of Camps'.

Location

Serpantinka. Drawing of an unknown prisoner. Pen on paper. From the collection of the Magadan Museum of Local Lore.

So-called Serpantinka was located near the village of Khatenakh or Khatynnakh, now non-existent (not to be confused with a village in the Sakha Republic). Presumably, it is conjectured by Ivan Panikratov to have been located in the place where the road from this village towards the village of Yagodnoye twisted along the slopes (serpantine is the Russian name for a hairpin turn). Nearby flows a stream called "Sniper".

One of the witnesses wrote in his memoirs:

At the end of the sixties, a certain Markelov D. came to me in Chisinau, who continued to work in Kolyma. He said that the hill above the former Serpantinka, the building of which was dismantled back in 1939, was blown up to throw at the place where several thousand people were buried, and then the bulldozer had leveled the ground for the whole summer in order to bury the cemetery deeper. My comrades got into this punitive confinement and ended their days there.

No documents exist concerning the organization of the Great Terror at low levels. However, there is a unique correspondence between the local departments of the NKVD, located in the village of Khatynnakh, with the NKVD Directorate, located 375 miles away, in Magadan. The cases of the prisoners were considered as follows: for example, on 29 January 1938, the head of the regional NKVD department of the Road Construction Directorate sent to Magadan 30 formalized case records, "approved" by the NKVD "troika" for Dalstroy two days before in the village of Orotukan (something like a visiting session) . Then follows a list of 30 names, sent to the head of the regional department of the NKVD for the Northern Mining Administration which was also located in the village of Khatynnakh. One name from this list was crossed out. And then there is a receipt from Maksimov, the head of the "komandirovka Serpantinnaya", that he received 29 convicts. Probably, usually the "troika" made their decisions, even without having case records before their eyes.

Number of victims

Alexander Mikaberidze estimates the number of victims at 30 thousands, shot or died of exhaustion. Robert Conquest says 26,000 people were killed in Kolyma in 1938 in "Serpantinka-type operations". Post-Soviet Russian researchers point out that Conquest did not have access to the archives and his numbers are often overstated. At the same time, archival documents about the Dalstroy camp system were withdrawn from the files in 1953, 1958 and 1961 and probably destroyed. The Russian historian Navasardov found out that there were two "troikas" of the NKVD, who considered the cases of prisoners at Dalstroy in pursuance of order No. 00447. The first "troika" issued 2,428 execution orders. Then the leadership of Dalstroy under the head of Eduard Berzin was arrested and mostly executed, and a new team sent from Moscow took up the proceeding of the prisoners' cases in December 1937. The new troika sentenced 5801 people to death in 11 months. The historian points out that these death sentences were carried out both in Magadan and Serpantinka, but does not give the number of those executed in the second case. Also, not all sentences were carried out. Russian historians Batsaev and Kozlov note that there is still a lot of unknown in the activities of the first "troika". Thus, the number of death sentences handed down in August–September 1937, when the operation began in execution of order No. 004447, is unknown, as well as the composition of the first "troika".

The book Ships will come for us provides data on the number of people shot at the "Stan Khatynnakh" (that is, on Serpantinka) on some days:

February 4, 1938, Stan Khatynnakh, - 56 people,
February 5, in the same place - 17 people,
February 7, in the same place - 204 people,
February 24, in same place, - 53 people,
March 4–5, in the same place, - 94 people,
March 7, in the same place, - 70 people,
March 8, in the same place, - 64 people,
March 9, in the same place - 157 people,
March 10–14, in the same place - 253 people.

The Gulag Archipelago (cited by Conquest) states that 30-50 people were shot in Serpantinka a day. Eyewitness I. Taratin watched as 70 people were shot in one night.

Memory

A concrete block with the name of the Serpantinka camp as part of the "Mask of Sorrow" monument in Magadan (foto by imagadan.livejournal.com)

On June 22, 1991 a monument was opened near the pass Khatynnakh, where road from the village of Yagodnoye, that departs from the Kolyma highway, goes toward the former village (urochishche) Khatynnakh. It was one of the first monuments in the USSR to victims of political repressions.

The Mask of Sorrow monument located in the city of Magadan contains 11 concrete blocks with the names of the GULAG camps in Kolyma, including Serpantinka.

Varlam Shalamov mentioned this camp (sometimes also under the name "Serpantinnaya") in his works. Thus, he wrote:

The documents of our past have been destroyed, the watchtowers taken down, the barracks razed to the ground, the rusty barbed wire wound up and taken away somewhere else. On the ruins of Serpantinka, the willow-herb blossoms – the flower of fire, of oblivion, an enemy of archives and of human memory. Did we exist? I answer: “we existed” – with all the poignancy of a judicial transcript, with the responsibility, the lucidity of a document.

— “The Glove” (1972)

Criticism

Documentary evidence of the existence of the prison has not yet been found. However, there is no evidence of official scientific expeditions and excavations at the supposed site of the prison. To accurately determine the location of the prison, it is necessary to organize a scientific archaeological expedition.

No mass graves were found at the site of the alleged location of the prison.

All available information about the prison is ultimately based on inmate folklore. In addition to the folklore of prisoners, there are testimonies of witnesses, more than ten people who were in the period of imprisonment near this prison.

See also

• Gulag
• Kolyma
• Stalinism
• Dalstroy

• Sevvostlag
• Great Purge
• Eduard Berzin
• Sandarmokh

Discussion of the deleted page "Serpentinka" in the Russian Wikipedia (in Russian)

External links

• Photo report about visiting the monument on the road from Yagodnoye to Khatynnakh (Russian text).
• Location of human remains discovered in 2004 by gold diggers (presumably a camp cemetery).

Sources

• Mikaberidze, Alexander (2018). Behind Barbed Wire: An Encyclopedia of Concentration and Prisoner-of-War Camps. ABC-CLIO. pp. 239–240. ISBN 978-1-4408-5762-1.
• Conquest, Robert (1979). Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-285091-1.
• Kolyma – Off to the Unknown – Stalin's Notorious Prison Camps in Siberia by Ayyub Baghirov (1906–1973)
• Martin J. Bollinger (2003). Stalin's Slave Ships: Kolyma, the Gulag Fleet, and the Role of the West. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 16. ISBN 978-0-275-98100-6.
• Batsaev, I. D.; Kozlov, A. G. (2002). Дальстрой и Севвостлаг ОГПУ-НКВД СССР в цифрах и документах: 1931-1941 (in Russian). СВКНИИ ДВО РАН. ISBN 9785947290066.
• Batsaev, I. D. (2002). Особенности промышленного освоения Северо-востока России в период массовых политических репрессий (1932-1953). Дальстрой (in Russian). СВКНИИ ДВО РАН. ISBN 5-94729-012-X.
• Navasardov, A. S. (2009). Деятельность тройки УНКВД по Дальстрою. Научные проблемы гуманитарных исследований (in Russian) (12–2): 86–90.