Forced settlers of various nationalities were based at Vityunino in the forest. In 1940 Polish citizens deported from land occupied by the USSR in autumn 1939 were sent here.
The area in which the deportees were buried today forms part of Vityunino. The graves have not survived; the names of 34 Poles who died and were buried in Vityunino are known. In 2013 a Russo-Polish youth expedition placed a memorial here (see photo). It reads:
“In memory of the Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Jews and people of other nationality who were victims of dekulakisation and deportation in the 1930s and 1940s and whose remains lie in this graveyard”.
The Memorial online database (2025) includes the names of 56,173 Polish citizens deported to the Arkhangelsk Region and records that 3,872 died there. (The source is the 1997 database mentioned elsewhere.) 36,454 of the deportees were men and women of Polish nationality, 11,883 were Jewish., 4,904 Belorussians and 1,894 Ukrainians.
| State of burials | Area | Boundaries |
|---|---|---|
|
not preserved
|
About 600 sq m
|
not delineated
|
[ Original texts & hyperlinks ]
“Vityunino settlement. Forced settlers’ cemetery”, Virtual Museum of the Gulag [retrieved, 28 May 2022; no longer accessible]
Reply from the Lensky urban district administration (№ 1509 of 07 April 2014) to a formal enquiry by RIC Memorial (St Petersburg)
