The camp outpost in Adzvavom (at different times part of the Ukhtpechlag, Vorkutlag and Intalag camp complexes) came into existence in the early 1930s as a transit point for prisoners being transported on foot or by river to Vorkuta (see No 11-28).
In 1941-1943 it became an outpost for disabled prisoners, after which the territory of the camp was used as a farm producing vegetables. The burial ground for prisoners who died there was located opposite the camp infirmary. Historians from the Inta museum of history and local studies estimate that from 1931 onwards no less than 2,000 prisoners were buried there.
In the 1960s and 1970s the burial ground was used for commercial and industrial purposes and the burials were not preserved. In 2000, an exploratory expedition from Inta surveyed the area of the camp outpost and its burial ground and interviewed elderly villagers.
An Orthodox cross has been erected and consecrated at the location of the graveyard. A notice attached to the cross reads: “To those who did not return.”
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 are listed as having died there. As the Memorial online database (2021) shows, the region’s Book of Remembrance does not specify where they died or were buried.
| State of burials | Area | Boundaries |
|---|---|---|
|
No trace remains of the burials. After the oil-prospecting camp closed the former site of the burial ground was covered with piles of scrap metal, and churned up by wheeled vehicles
|
100 x 100 metres
|
Not fenced off
|
[ Original texts & hyperlinks ]
N.A. Morozov, The Gulag in the Komi region, 1929-1956, Syktyvkar, 1997
Report of the Inta local history museum expedition in 2000 to uncover mass burials … along the Usa river – Pokayanie Fund archive (Syktyvkar)
L.N. Malofeyevskaya, The town on the Bolshaya Inta River, Syktyvkar, 2004
L.N. Malofeyevskaya, They called us enemies …, Syktyvkar, 2008
*
“The prisoners burial ground of the Ukhtpechlag (Vorkutlag, Intalag) camp outpost in Adzvavom”, The Virtual Museum of the Gulag [retrieved on 26 May 2022]
Reply from the Inta urban district administration (№ 09/8359 of 25 June 2014) to a formal enquiry by RIC Memorial (St Petersburg)
