Forced settlers of various nationalities (Lithuanians, Latvians, Germans, Finns and others) were allocated to the Tit Ary Island between 1942 and 1947. There were also inhabitants of Yakutia’s Churpanchinsky district, forcibly mobilised to work in the fishing industry. Those who died were buried next to the settlement and grouped according to their nationality. The total number interred there has not been established. After the fishery closed and the forced settlers dispersed, the graveyard was abandoned.
Since the late 1980s, Lithuanians and Finns have visited the island several times and tidied up their parts of the graveyard. In 1989, an expedition from Lithuania erected a memorial and a tall cross in the cemetery. An inscription in four languages (Lithuanian, Russian, Yakut and Finnish) reads: “Forcibly torn from their native land, fallen but not forgotten”. The area containing Yakut burials has today been almost entirely obliterated.
The List of Repressed Finns provides 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 period 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 |
|---|---|---|
|
The burials have come to the surface; headboards and crosses have been destroyed
|
not established
|
not delineated
|
[ Original texts & hyperlinks ]
O.A. Markene, “A world without kind people”, Lithuanians on the Arctic Sea (compiler R. Merkite), Yakutsk, 1995
D.P. Chechebutov, With tears in our eyes: Memoirs of settlers from Churpanchinsky district, Yakutsk, 2002 (304 pp; in Yakut)
“Tit Ary Island. Forced labourers and settlers graveyard”, Virtual Museum of the Gulag [retrieved, 26 May 2022; no longer accessible]
