The camp burial ground next to Shevchenko village (Taishet district) was used in succession by Yuzhlag prisoners, the Taishetlag outpost for the disabled (1943-1946), the Bratsk corrective-labour camp (1946-1947) and, finally, central hospital No 1 of Ozerlag from 1948 to 1954. Prisoners were buried in individual and common graves. The names of some buried there are known – I.I. Shtakelberg, General Sergei Wojciechowski (1883-1951) – but the exact place of their burial cannot now be determined.
In 1990 pupils from school No. 2 in Taishet, led by local historian Ye.S. Seleznyov, studied the burials. They found about 200 burial mounds and marked them with stakes. In 2003 members of the Biryusa Memorial Society placed a collective memorial there, a wooden cross with the inscription, “To the inmates of the Taishet camps, who were unjustly imprisoned and died in captivity”.
The 2025 Memorial database lists 25,729 victims in the Irkutsk Region. See Pivovarikha (which does not include ‘outsiders’ sent to the Region’s special settlements or camps).
From other sources the database names 102 prisoners in Yuzhlag, 40 of whom died there, and 387 sent to Taishetlag (many arrested in 1937-8).
| State of burials | Area | Boundaries |
|---|---|---|
|
About 200 burial mounds have survived; they were marked by stakes in 1990
|
not determined
|
not delineated
|
[ Original texts & hyperlinks ]
Bert Kork, “General Wojciechowski‘s exclusion zone”, Irkutsky reporter, 15 November 2010 [retrieved 9 June 2022]
“A meeting between members of Biryusa Memorial and activists of the society ‘In Memory of the Czechoslovak Legion’,” Biryusina dolina website
T.A. and Ye.S. Seleznyov, The camps in the past of Taishet, booklet No. 4, Taishet, 2000 (In the series, Taishet, a city born of the Trans-Siberian Railroad)
