How the wives of traitors of the motherland sat: stories of women from the Akmola camp

Screenshot from the video “Present Tense”

ALZHIR - the Akmola camp of the wives of traitors to their homeland in the Kazakh village of Akmol, near Astana, was so abbreviated. Since 1938, repressed women from all over the USSR were exiled there; in 16 years more than 20 thousands of prisoners passed through the camp.

Their stories collected edition “Currently,".

In ALGERIA there was not a single woman convicted personally. All of them were to blame only for the fact that their relatives were recognized as “enemies of the people.”

Leon Nurmukhamedov, the son of the former people's commissar, the Minister of Agriculture of Kazakhstan Khasen Nurmukhamedov, said that after the execution of his father's father, Kira Berseneva was arrested and sent to ALZHIR. The child survived only thanks to the maternal grandmother.

“She found the strength to come to Alma-Ata and find me dying in some barracks. She managed to draw up all sorts of documents and bring them to Russia,” he said.

The daughter of the Belarusian poet Todor Klyashtorny in the Akmola camp of the wives of traitors to the motherland turned out to be with her mother.

“When my father’s sentence was “10 years without the right to correspondence,” then my mother was arrested,” recalls Maya Klyashtornaya.

Maya is not the only child sent to ALGERIA with her mother. There quickly became so many children in the camp that, at the request of the head of the camp, Sergei Barinov, and a well-known Moscow pediatrician in the 30s, also a prisoner of ALZHIR, Hana Martinson, organized a so-called “nursery” in the camp. The babies were in barracks adjacent to their mothers, but they were separated by barbed wire. And after they turned 3 years old, an orphanage awaited the children.

Screenshot from the video “Present Tense”

Kazakhs how could rescued exhausted women from the camp. Director Daria Violina, granddaughter of Lydia Frenkel-Violina, former prisoner of ALZHIR, tells how her grandmother recalled with gratitude the residents of the village near the camp.

“For many years I wanted to be in Kazakhstan and see this land, because my grandmother said a lot of good things. People who went through the camps in this country retained a very good memory of Kazakhstan and the Kazakh people, who were very merciful to them,” says Violina.

Daria is the author of two documentaries about the fate of women and children of ALZHER: “Longer than life” and “We will live.”

In 2007, a memorial complex was built in the village of Akmol, which is called ALZHIR. Museum workers bit by bit collected information about the prisoners of the camp in the archives of the NKVD, and some of the exhibits were provided by relatives of women prisoners.

Screenshot from the video “Present Tense”

Beginning from 1937, the largest camps of the GULAG structure were located in Kazakhstan - ALZHIR, Steplag (Special Camp No. 4, camp for political prisoners in the village of Kengir, Karaganda Oblast of Kazakhstan), Karlag (Karaganda Labor Camp). The republic has practically turned into one big prison. During the years of repression, more than 5 million people were officially sent to camps in Kazakhstan. But unofficial data far exceed this figure.

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