We have just looked at the fate of the older brother of First Transport refugee, Aleksander Nõmm. Heimar Nõmm had sought the protection of the Saremaa woods to become what was known throughout the Baltic States as a Forest Brother, fighting against his country's occupiers. Six months after his capture, Heimar received a sentence of 10 years' hard labour in a Soviet prison camp.
Younger brother, Artur
Their younger brother, Artur, had been providing Heimar with food and trying to help with whatever else was needed. He was arrested on 23 December 1946, so not while making a delivery to Heimar but one week later. Had Heimar been tortured to admit who was helping him or was the arrest made on the grounds of reasonable suspicion? Any sort of suspicion was reasonable ground for arrest in the Soviet Union of 1946.
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| The Nõmm brothers, Aleksander (Sass), Heimar and Artur Source: Collection of Silvi Nõmm Simpson |
The brothers were tried on the same day though, maybe even together. Artur was charged under Sections 17 and 58-1b with both treason and assisting treason. He was given what seems, given the charges, the comparatively light sentence of 5 years in a labour camp. The place where the sentence was to be served was probably more frightening than its length.
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| Artur Nõmm's entry in the electronic part of Memorial to Estonia's Victims of Communism 1940-1991 'Otsing' means 'Search' and the subheadings translate as 'Family Register', 'Political Arrests in Estonia, Vol. 1' and 'National Population Register' |
Artur was 22 years old when sent to the Kargopollag in Arkhangelsk Oblast. An Oblast is the equivalent of a State in Australia or the USA, but without their independent governments. In reality, it was then a regional administrative unit carrying out the orders of the central government.
Arkhangelsk Oblast lies to the west of the Komi ASSR, where Heimar was sent, and to the east of Karelia, parts of which were Finnish until WWII (hence Sibelius' Karelia Suite and its central importance to Finnish identity).
The Kargopollag (officially the Kargopolsky ITL or Corrective Labor Camp) was in the southwest of Arkhangelsk Oblast. Its central purpose was forestry or, to be more accurate about what actually happened, deforestation. In addition, the prisoners had to built the infrastructure for these operations, including railways.
The area was grew much aspen, an ideal wood for matches. That's because it doesn't splinter, burns easily and absorbs fire-retardant chemicals for the part of the match which is not the head. Matches in the 1940s were far more necessary than they are today, for many reasons, starting with a wood fire not now being the primary means of heating for most in urban areas. Kargopollag inmates were not only chopping down the aspen trees but processing them into the raw match splints.
Kargopollag inmates provided many other timber products, from railway sleepers for the expansion of the Soviet rail network, including the North Pechora Railway, to pulp, paper and cellulose.
Timber-getting was considered one of the deadliest jobs in the entire Gulag system. Prisoners worked all day in the open air. In the winter, they laboured up to their waists in freezing sub-arctic snow. In the summer, there were constant swarms of mosquitoes, midges and blackflies. The blackflies cut open the skin to lick up the blood, with anticoagulants in their saliva which cause an allergic reaction. Being bitten by a large swarm causes symptoms similar to influenza, known collectively as blackfly fever. That's apart from being in the wrong place when a tree falls.
Of course there was no insect repellant or netting to keep the insects off the prisoners' bodies. A common punishment inflicted by the guards was to tie a naked prisoner to a tree, leaving him as bait for the insect swarms. Such a victim could last only a couple of hours before death.
Those who could speak about the labour camp environment afterwards noted that a prisoner assigned to the heavy forest-logging brigades rarely survived more than two years.
There is a lot of documentation of the cruel conditions in Kargopollag, most famously in A World Apart (Inny Świat) by Polish writer and philosopher Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, who survived a year and a half in the camp's Yertsevo sector. This book was published first in 1951 so it recounts experiences fresh in its author's mind.
Archangelsk was Russia's main port, at least during summer, before St Petersburg was built starting in 1703. This meant that centuries of Russians had been checking the conditions in the Oblast from some 900 years ago.
The people already there in the north were the Nenets, a Samoyedic group. Their language is related to the Finno-Ugrian ones, fitting under the broader umbrella of Uralic. Like the Sami in the Scandinavian countries, they are reindeer herders. Their main food is reindeer meat and fish, but they also drink reindeer blood, rich not only in iron but also in Vitamin C, so they don't get scurvy.
South of the Nenets, the original inhabitants of central and southern Arkangelsk Oblast were more Finno-Ugrian tribes. They have been completely absorbed into the colonising Russian population, but their presence can still be felt in the names of the rivers, lakes and villages in the Oblast. Most of these names come from Finno-Ugrian words.
The Russian colonisers, intermarrying with the Finno-Ugrian natives, developed their own dialect, culture and lifestyle adapted to their harsh environment. They now are known as Pomors, from a word meaning "living by the sea". Their economic activities of whaling, maritime hunting and cod fishing led to them becoming expert boat builders.
Artur was released from the Kargopollag on 12 December 1951. This would have been under highly controlled conditions, starting with a march across the snow or, if he was luckier, a trip on a horse-drawn timber sled to one of the camp's railway hubs, Yertsevo or Nyandoma, on the main Vologda–Arkhangelsk rail line. From there he would have travelled in a guarded prison car through Vologda to Leningrad (now St Petersburg).
From St Petersburg, he would have been put on a train to Estonia's capital, Tallinn. To return to Saaremaa, he needed a permit issued by the MGB (Ministry of State Security), successor to the dreaded NKVD but still known colloquially by the old name. If he had a permit, travel from Tallinn involved a train to Virtsu and beyond that, the mode depended on the thickness of the ice. If it was thick enough, trucks or horse-drawn sleds made the journey. Ice-breaking ferries could travel through thinner ice.
But Artur did not receive his permit, so was forced to live on mainland Estonia. He managed to return to Saaremaa for major family events, like funerals and weddings.
Heimar and Artur's brother, Aleksander, taken as a prisoner-of-war to Germany in 1944, then selected for resettlement in Australia, lived passed his 98th birthday. Their father lived to 89, despite also having spent time in Siberia, as we will see. Their mother, also sent to Siberia, lived to 82 and their sister Linda, lucky not to be arrested also for her support of Heimar in the woods, lived to 78. Given this longevity, Artur's death at the age of only 60 in 1986, like Heimar's death at the age of only 61, has to be attributed to his time in Kargopollag.
SOURCES
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'Estonia's victims of communism 1940–1991' https://memoriaal.ee, accessed 28 August 2026.
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Swedish Match, 'What Are We Leaving Behind' https://www.swedishmatchindustries.com/production/sustainability, accessed 31 August 2026.
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Wikipedia 'Siberian Minorities in the Soviet Era' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_minorities_in_the_Soviet_era, accessed 31 August 2026.
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