In 1942-1947, forced settlers from the Leningrad Region (mainly Finns), and deported Lithuanians were sent to Bykovsky Mys. There was high mortality among the deportees in 1942 and 1943. A plot for a graveyard was selected on the seaward side of the settlement, and cracks in the permafrost were used for graves. In the second half of the 1940s the fishery closed, the settlers dispersed and the graveyard was abandoned. The numbers buried there have not been established; a list of Lithuanian deportees has been published in Lithuania. Over time a considerable part of the graveyard was washed into the sea and a majority of the graves were lost.
In 1989, an expedition of former Lithuanian deportees visited the area and erected individual and collective commemorative signs in the cemetery. They also put up a memorial in the village with an inscription in four languages (Lithuanian, Russian, Yakut and Finnish) which reads: “Forcibly torn from their native land, fallen but not forgotten”.
The List of Repressed Finns (18,000 names in Latin and Cyrillic scripts)
Research on the Genocide of the Lithuanian People (Lietuvos gyventoju Genocidas; 3 vols. 1999-2009) contains about 130,000 biographical entries (in Lithuanian). Vols. 1 & 2 cover the years from 1939 to 1947 and see Deportation of Lithuanians, 1941-1951 for the 28 other burial grounds and commemorative sites on the Map of Memory.
The Memorial online database (2025) lists 9,675 victims in the Republic of Sakha (BR 7,417).
402 were condemned to death; charges against 2,145 were dropped (23 died in captivity). Over 3,000 were sent to the camps. The Book of Remembrance and police records name families and individuals (total 3,860) who became forced settlers and deportees or were born in Yakutia’s special settlements (1,103): 93 were accused of belonging to the OUN (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists), 401 were “kulaks”, 746 Soviet Germans, and 430 sent to the Bulunsky district (almost all born in the Leningrad Region).
| State of burials | Area | Boundaries |
|---|---|---|
|
Some grave crosses have survived
|
not defined
|
not delineated
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[ Original texts & hyperlinks ]
Lithuanians in the Arctic [Lietuviai Arktyje], compiled by Markauskas and J.R. Puodzius; The Brotherhood of the Laptev Sea Exiles, Kaunas, 2000 (112 pp; in English)
“Bykovsky village. Forced labourers and settlers graveyard”, Virtual Museum of the Gulag [retrieved, 26 May 2022; no longer accessible]
