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”.
Information about deceased Gulag inmates, where it survives, can be found in Memorial’s Victims of Political Terror database with its 3 million entries, or in the Open List database (“Victims of Political Repression in the USSR, 1917-1991”).
| 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)
