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MVD ArrestsAuthor’s note… the source for these MVD files is the Odessa Martirology Book volume 4. The following is a translation of pages 56- 59 of the book. In addition to the names of the repressed, the book also contains other valuable information pertaining to the brutality during the repressive era of the Soviet Regime. Unfortunately, the book cannot be purchased at this time. Odessa Martirology Book: Information about those repressed in Odessa and Odessa region during the soviets. Vol. 4, pages 56 - 59. (Series "Rehabilitated by History"). Special settlers fall within the largest category of those repressed in the USSR. Numbering in the millions they were people who had been subjected to mass deportation during various periods of the soviets rule. By administrative means they were ejected from their place of permanent residence, deprived of property, and sent to special settlements in the USSR’s most remote regions and were relegated to forced labor. These people had not perpetrated any crime, but rather just belonged to some definite social group (well-off villagers, handicraftsmen, tradesmen, etc.), definite nationalities (Germans, Greeks, Tatars, Bulgarians, Ossetes, Chechens, Kalmyks, Estonians, Lithuanians, Letts, Poles, etc.), definite faith (Baptists, old-believers, Jehovists, etc.), in possession of a different citizenship (volksdeutsche, those interned, repatriates, deserters, etc.) or other social indications based upon that which a soviet official decidedly attributed them in as either a "socially injurious element" or a "socially dangerous element" category. Millions of soviet citizens were also sent to the special settlements after serving their sentences in camps and prisons where they were repeatingly repressed for the same crimes that they had never perpetrated. They were then used to provide the army with a gratuitous labor force at such places as mines, timber industry enterprises and distant construction projects. When comparing these repressions to criminal prosecution, arrest or investigation, one would have to agree that this is a different kind of repression, precisely administrative and a new category of those repressed -- specially resettled. These repressions were based upon such grounds as various government edicts, proper orders of special services, or resolutions of local power executive agencies. This sort of repression might not appear to be as bloody as mass executions and imprisonment into camps. However, if one is to take into account that whole families, khutors and even villages were ejected with the misappropriation of their houses and properties by those who moved them, that the ejected were directed to the most hostile of places (forests, desert, tundra), that they were registered there to be under the supervision of the GPU/NKVD/MGB special commandant offices, that thousands of people died due to inadequate living and labor conditions, and that those born at special settlements automatically became the repressed -- it becomes obvious that this kind of repressions is no less cruel or dreadful than other forms. Moreover, the number of people that were subjected to these repressions, even according to preliminary data, is much greater than those are under investigation, and is at least more than those whose cases were discontinued and are, comparatively, available for researchers. As an example, there are files for about 36,000 repressed people kept at the SBU Odessa Regional Department while the MVD Odessa Regional Department in its Collection 7 of "Specially Resettled" has information on about 100,000 people who were subjected to this sort of repression (One also has to take into account that their relatives were also sent to the special settlements). The main reasons for resettlement in our region were:
People specially resettled were correspondingly registered as:
Most of the files of this collection were not initiated in Odessa. These files were started at the places of the resettlement special commandant offices and after the repressed were deregistrated. The files were then sent to Odessa. It was established after making archival references on the first set of eight thousand files of Collection 7, that the main portion of these files came from the Sverdlovsk, Tomsk and Perm Regional Departments of the Russian MVD. Thus, they are not the initial files started when people were exiled from the Odessa region and Bessarabia, but either personal files originated at the place of resettlement or files of surveillance initiated because of the resettled case reconsideration and carrying out a decision for the individual’s deregistration. As a rule, these files were started at the last place of special settlement and it is difficult to speculate as to where any preceding files were sent. Most of the files are personal, i.e. each file pertaining to one person. However, since entire families were sent to special settlements, almost every file contains information about spouses, parents, children, siblings and other relatives ejected along with the person or separately. Since most of the families were large and from the countryside, with numerous and complicated relationships, many files contain the names of up to ten and more additional close and distant relatives who also were repressed. The average file for any specially resettled individual will contain additional information on at least four to six other repressed relatives of that individual. |