From the 1920s onwards, a section of USEVLON (the Special Northern Camps Directorate) was in operation in Lyavlya village. Mass executions took place nearby up until the 1950s.
An exploratory group (A. Sukhanovsky, I. Ivlev, V.A. Mitin, N.V. Sukhanov and others) searched from the end of the 1980s for the burials of those shot. They found one such location in the woods near the Severodvinka gardening cooperative. Test digs were carried out in October 1989, and the remains of people with bullet holes in their skulls were found, laid out in several rows. The Primorsky district prosecutor’s office studied the burial site and expert examination of 42 skulls confirmed that they had been shot in 1934-1936.
Between 1999 and 2009 the explorers’ group and the public worked to create a memorial to the executed and to care for the territory. Today it is surrounded by a fence and wooden and metal commemorative crosses have been erected in the memorial area. The Primorsky district administration says that work on the memorial complex is carried out by the district’s Centre for Patriotic Education in conjunction with the Lyavlenskoe administration.
The Coast-Dwellers Memorial: A Book in Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression (3 vols. 1999-2001) includes biographical entries on 16,000 who were imprisoned or shot. (Unusually the Arkhangelsk Region Book of Remembrance includes the number of each victim’s dependent children.) The Memorial online database (2021) lists 2,313 who were shot in the Arkhangelsk Region – 1,502 during the Great Terror – and names 10,777 from the region and beyond who were sent to the camps.
| Date | Nature of ceremonies | Organiser or responsible person | Participants | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Summer
|
Religious procession with crosses and banners to mark the Feast of Russia’s New Martyrs and Confessors
|
Centre under the Archangel Metropolitan for the Study and Commemoration of the New Russian Martyrs and Confessors
|
Clergy and congregation of the ROC's Arkhangelsk and Kholmogory diocese, Arkhangelsk Region officials
|
Annual event
|
| State of burials | Area | Boundaries |
|---|---|---|
|
Traces of burial subsidence, today marked by wooden Orthodox crosses
|
Not defined. Part of the land is occupied by structures of the Severodvinka cooperative
|
Not delineated. Part of the land is surrounded by a wooden fence
|
[ original texts and hyperlinks ]
N.V. Sukhanov (ed), Along the Dvina to the Holy Mother of God, Arkhangelsk, 2005
A. Shvetsova, “Suffering and slain innocents near Lyavlya village during the years of mass repression”, My Orthodox Motherland, 2007 [retrieved, 28 May 2022]
Svetlana Gavrilova, “Lyavlya’s path of penitence”, Russkaya narodnaya liniya, 12 October 2007 [retrieved, 28 May 2022]
“Young explorers have cared for and maintained the memorial to the victims of political repression in Lyavlya”, Nasha molodyozh, 19 July 2012 [retrieved, 28 May 2022]
“Memorial crosses”, Remarks of an Arkhangelsk dweller, 3 September 2012
Nikolai Sukhanov, “Each day we learn more about our new martyrs”, Tserkovny Vestnik, No 11, November 2012 [retrieved, 28 May 2022]
“A virtual museum of New Martyrs and Confessors is being created in Arkhangelsk”, Pravoslavie.ru, 30 May 2014 [retrieved, 28 May 2022]
“Lyavlya village. Burial of executed near Severodvinka”, Virtual Museum of the Gulag [retrieved, 28 May 2022]
Reply from the Primorsky urban district department for social policy (№ 240 of 26 March 2014) to a formal enquiry by RIC Memorial (St Petersburg)
