From 1941 onwards prisoners who died in the prisons of Omsk were buried in the Staro-Severnoe cemetery. Subsequently other graves were created over those parts of the burial ground. The numbers of prisoners buried there has not been established. After 1944 forced settlers, including deported Kalmyks, were buried in other parts of the cemetery.
On 24 May 2002 with the agreement of the city administration a memorial was erected in the cemetery to deported Kalmyks who died in the Omsk Region. The area where they were buried is unknown and the memorial stands on the presumed site of their interment. An inscription on the pillar reads: “To the victims of Stalinist repression, 1943-1957, from the Kalmyk nation”, and there is a quotation from the verse of Kalmyk poet David Kugultinov, “I know that my people found / friends in the forests of Siberia / and once again took heart amongst the best Russians, / among the most generous in the world, / sharing our fate and our bread …”
In addition to Lest we Forget: A Book in Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression (11 vols. 2000-2004) with biographical entries on 30,587 people who were shot or sent to the camps, and the five-volume Siberian Golgotha (2013-2015) about 15,000 of the Region’s dekulakized families, a recent volume Involuntary Siberians (2017) documents the lives of those deported to the Omsk Region from elsewhere.
Drawing on those and other sources, Memorial’s database (2025) names 68,706 victims in the Omsk Region (BR 46,795).
8,607 were shot, most during the Great Terror (7,344). Charges were dropped against 6,539 other individuals; 180 of them died in captivity. Over 16,000 were held in the camps where 522 died. The “Peasant Golgotha” source names families and individuals (total 16,671) who were deported from the Region – 10,308 in 1930-1. Police records list more families and individuals (total 21,910) who were either sent to special settlements in the Omsk Region (9,702 from Saratov and the Volga German republic in 1941) or were born there (2436) in the 1940s and 1950s.
The Memorial online database (2025) includes 25,580 Kalmyks who died after being deported at the end of 1943.
| State of burials | Area | Boundaries |
|---|---|---|
|
have not survived
|
not determined
|
not delineated
|
[ Original texts & hyperlinks ]
E.P. Otten, “Places where the victims of mass repression are buried in Omsk”, Omsky Necropolis, a collection of articles, Omsk, 2005
*
Reply from the Omsk City Administration (№ AG/11-1673 of 09 April 2014) to a formal enquiry by RIC Memorial (St Petersburg)
Reply from the Omsk Region Administration (№ 14/PR-1356/02 of 1 April 2014) to a formal enquiry by RIC Memorial (St Petersburg)
