Corrective-labour colony No. 11 was based at Lesozavod (Timber mill) settlement from 1936 to 1964. The prisoners were employed felling trees and building a narrow-gauge railway. Those who died were buried in the graveyards of the nearest villages, Bolshie and Malye Kandaly, and in the woods one kilometre to the west of Lesozavod.
Old inhabitants recall that prisoners were first buried in common graves at the Bolshekandaly graveyard; then their graves were moved to an unpopulated area. Local historians estimate that several thousand were interred on the outskirts of the former colony. Today only the traces of a few camp burials survive. In August 2010 the area was studied by journalists from the online magazine, “Ulyanovsk, a City of News”, and they interviewed the inhabitants of neighbouring villages.
A Book in Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression: Ulyanovsk Region (2 vols. 1996 & 2001) contains 13,600 biographical entries for those shot or sent to the Gulag; vol. 2 includes 2,500 entries on Soviet German forced settlers in the region.
The Memorial online database (2025) lists 28,537 victims in the Ulyanovsk Region (BR 16,028).
The majority (18,742) were born locally. 1,817 were shot, most sentenced during the Great Terror (1,338); almost 8,000 were held in the camps. Over 12,000 were “dekulakised” and deported from the Region in the early 1930s and 3,000 were sent to the Ulyanovsk Region, during and after the war, because of their “nationality”.
| State of burials | Area | Boundaries |
|---|---|---|
|
characteristic subsidence
|
not determined
|
not delineated
|
[ Original texts & hyperlinks ]
A. Pavlov, “The Gulag in the forests of the Ulyanovsk Region”, Ulyanovsk, City of News, 3 August 2010 [retrieved, 19 January 2025; no longer accessible, August 2025]
“The Lesnaya Polyana settlement; the Kandalinskoe rural settlement”, Staromainsky municipal district
