Inhabitants of the Monastyryok special settlement were buried in the Privodino graveyard. At first, after 1929, they were dekulakized peasant families from Ukraine, Belorussia and the southern parts of Russia; later, in 1940-1941, they were Poles from territory seized by the USSR in 1939. The numbers of men, women and children buried here are unknown; there is a list of 62 deceased Poles. It is not known where the burials of the forced settlers were made. The Polish section of the graveyard was overgrown with young trees and grave markers have not survived.
In 2002, pupils from school No 4 in Kotlas (director, A.I. Smolina) tidied the territory of the graveyard and put up ten boards around the perimeter bearing the text, “In this section Poles deported from their motherland were buried in 1940-1941. The ‘Let’s not forget’ group”. In June 2012, a Polish delegation from Tarnow erected a commemorative cross in the former 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 |
|---|---|---|
|
Characteristic subsidence over burials; in 2008 about 15 graves could be discerned
|
About 150 sq m
|
partially delineated
|
[ Original texts & hyperlinks ]
A. Dembovska, The Poles in the Russian North: An album of Polish sites of remembrance, St Petersburg, 2011
“The Polish section of Privodino settlement graveyard”, Virtual Museum of the Gulag [retrieved, 28 May 2022; no longer accessible]
