The Vorkutlag prisoners at the Rudnik settlement built a narrow-gauge railway to mineshaft No 18 (Rudnik means a pit). Those who died were interred in a burial ground one kilometre west of the Rudnik settlement and 1.5 kms from the embankment of the now dismantled railway. Camp burials were in both individual or mass graves. In August 2010, researcher A.V. Kalmykov studied the burial ground and found graveside crosses dating back to 1954-1955.
*
In July 2023, a local deputy reported that a concrete cross at the Rudnik settlement erected in 1997 in memory of Polish inmates of the Gulag had been taken down by vandals.
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”).
Repentance: the Komi Republic Martyrology of the Victims of Mass Political Repression (11 vols. 1998-2016), includes biographical entries on 52,785 who were sent to the camps in Komi, of whom 10,364 died there.
As the Memorial online database (2021) shows, the region’s Book of Remembrance does not specify where they died and were buried.
| Date | Nature of ceremonies | Organiser or responsible person | Participants | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
nk
|
Exploratory excursions
|
Pokayanie foundation
|
nk
|
From time to time
|
| State of burials | Area | Boundaries |
|---|---|---|
|
Some burial mounds and subsidence; graveside crosses
|
not established
|
not delineated
|
[ Original texts & hyperlinks ]
Communication from A.V. Kalmykov (Vorkuta 2010) – archive of RIC Memorial (St Petersburg)
*
“Near Vorkuta a memorial to Polish inmates of the Gulag has been destroyed”, Kholod, 1 October 2023 [retrieved 31 October 2023].
