We have noted recently that all but one of Aleksander Nõmm's immediate family were sent to Siberia from Estonia during the 1947-49 period. We now have the opportunity to consider the conditions in which they lived and worked.
Older Brother, HeimarAleksander's older brother, Heimar, the Forest Brother, was the first to be arrested. From 16 December 1946, he waited more than 6 months to appear before a Soviet tribunal on 21 June 1947. If he had not been told before, he knew now that he was charged under the Soviet Socialist Republic's penal code's Sections 58-1b, treason by military personnel/desertion, and 58-11, being part of a counter-revolutionary organisation/group.
Documents from the Archive of the Estonian SSR Prosecutor's Office report that he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment and sent to the Pechora Labour Camp in the Komi ASSR (Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) in northeast European Russia, near the Arctic Circle. He was 27 years old at the time.
Gemini.ai reports that Pechorlag (or Sevpechlag during its earlier years) was a major forced-labor camp complex within the Gulag system. The name is a portmanteau of the Pechora River basin, where the camp operated, and lag, the standard abbreviation for a Soviet labor camp (lager).
While many neighboring camps in the Komi region focused primarily on coal or oil extraction, Pechorlag’s central objective was infrastructure.
Its prisoners were forced to build the North Pechora Railway — a 500-kilometer-long railroad over treacherous permafrost and swampy taiga. The strategic goal of this line was to connect the remote, coal-rich Arctic mines of Vorkuta to the industrial centres of urban Russia. Vorkuta had become a critical lifeline for the Soviet Union during World War II when western coalfields were captured by Nazi Germany,
The amount of food available was tied to a prisoner’s work productivity. If a brigade failed to meet its daily quota ("norm"), their food allotment was slashed. This created a lethal downward spiral: exhausted, starving prisoners produced less work, received less food, and rapidly succumbed to starvation or disease.
Desperate prisoners could resort to self-harm to escape their work, chopping off their own fingers, or intentionally rubbing dirt, faeces, or caustic chemicals into minor wounds to cause severe infections. The aim was to get to the camp hospital, the only place where a prisoner could sleep indoors and escape the freezing cold.
Political prisoners like Heimar were abused by the guards, but the camp administration gave authority also to violent criminal inmates (blatnye) to assault, rob and otherwise keep the political prisoners living in fear.
The indigenous people, the Komi are Finno-Ugrian, like the Estonians, although separated by at least a couple of thousand years of cultural and linguistic development. The introduction of prison camps into their homeland disrupted their subsistence lives, by the rapid cutting of forests for timber and the Railway cutting across ecosystems including animal migration routes.
The Komis' previous lives were similar to the pattern still followed by their Finno-Ugrian relatives, the Sami, previously known in English by the disparaging name of Lapps. They live mainly in the north of Norway, Sweden and Finland while there is a small population on Russia's Kola Peninsula.
Before Heimar's imprisonment, a Komi leader who supported industrialisation of his homeland, Dmitry Batiev, had been arrested under false charges of creating a "counter-revolutionary nationalist organisation" and imprisoned in Ukhtpechlag (the precursor camp to the Pechora line system) before being executed in 1941. Under Stalin, much of the Komi intellectual and cultural leadership suffered similar fates. (Wikipedia)
The camp system had grown out of earlier regional camps and took distinct shape as Sevpechlag (North Pechora Ispravitelno-Trudovoy Lager or ITL, that is, Corrective Labour Camp in English) in 1940. During WWII, the pressure to complete the railway line meant prisoners were subjected to relentless work schedules under lethal conditions.
The complex was formally reorganised as Pechorlag (Pechora ITL) in 1950 and continued operating throughout the height of the post-war Gulag era, before being dissolved or merged into other regional administrative systems in 1959 following Stalin's death.
The conditions in Pechorlag were notoriously horrific, defined by the grueling climate of the frozen tundra, extreme malnutrition, overcrowding, and rampant disease. The camp held a mix of political and criminal prisoners.
The political prisoners were individuals who, like Heimar, had been arrested under the sweeping Article 58 of the Soviet Penal Code for "counter-revolutionary activities." This included waves of dissidents, intellectuals, and citizens from newly annexed Soviet territories, including thousands of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Poles.
Pechorlag is well-known in the English-language Gulag literature, largely due to a rare and unprecedented memoir titled Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir written by Fyodor Mochulsky. Mochulsky was a 22-year-old railway engineer sent by the Communist Party to work as the supervisor at Pechorlag in 1940.
His account was published posthumously in 2011 by Oxford University Press, translated and edited by Deborah Kaple, with a foreword by her. It provided historians with a unique look at the day-to-day horrors and logistics of the camp from the perspective of the administration rather than the victims.
Today, the modern town of Pechora stands where the camp's main central railway station and administrative hub, built entirely on the forced labor of the camp's prisoners, once sat. The camp system has led to the Komi being forced to adapt to a heavily industrialised, Russified urban environment.
Heimar was freed on 10 July 1955, probably free to try to make his own way home to Saareaa across more than 2,500 of harsh terrain, often swampy in summer. With luck, and perhaps some money from somewhere, he could make some of this trip by train, along with coal from Vorkuta.
Younger Brother, Artur
Heimar and Sass' 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 while 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?
They 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.
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 is 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 salivia 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 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, unlike Mochulsky's memoir which was written 40 years later, 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, starting 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 what if Artur was banned from returning to his home? That we do not know.
Parents, Jaan and Maria
In March 1949, throughout the Baltic States, the KGB's predecessor rounded up members of the families of those already convicted of crimes against the state and farmers with their families. The aim was to break co-operation with the remaining Forest Brothers and to remove resistance to the introduction of state-run collective farms.
In the case of the Nõmm family, father, mother and daughter Linda fitted into both categories, as family members of a Forest Brother and his helper, and members of the kulak class.
As with the 1941 mass deportation, those rounded up were packed into unheated cattle train cars. When these trains finally began to move, they had the lowest priority on the railways, so their journey to Siberia lasted weeks. Those in the cattle cars had minimal food and water and sanitation probably was a hole in the floor.
Many died under the conditions of the journey, including the still cold weather in late March and into April.
Aleksander Nõmm's father, Jaan, born in January 1886, was already 63 years old when his journey to the Mikhaylovsky region of the Novosibirsk Oblast began. This region was centred on the town of Mikhaylovka, in the southwest of the Oblast, bordering the Kulunda Steppe which, in turn, stretches into Kazakhstan.
The climate there definitely is continental. The winters are long, with temperatures dropping below -40°C and fierce blizzards. In the short summers, daytime temperature typically reach the high 20's, but heatwaves can reach the high 30's. In addition, summers brought the same mosquitoes, midges and blackflies experienced by Jaan's sons, Heimar and Artur, in their more northerly exiles.
The family knew all 3 of these potentially lethal pests from Saaremaa, but not in the same density as experienced inland. Along the coasts (Saaremaa does mean "Island land") breezes keep them at bay. Even inland on Saaremaa though, they breed in the wetlands, lakes or in juniper stands. Back in the 1940s, cheesecloth could be used to screen the insect outs, smoke pots kept them away from outdoor workers and native plants like wild mint or wormwood could be rubbed on the skin for a repellant. Another repellant was tar water, made by leaving pine or birch tar in to soak in water for several days.
In the Novosibirsk Oblast, another biting insect repellant was juice from some of the local Allium species. Allium is the name for the group of plants which includes well known edibles such as chives, various onions, leeks and garlics. Around the world, there now are some 1,000 separate species of Allium known. Totals differ because apparently new, wild species are discovered frequently, especially in Central Asia, near where Jaan was.
Indeed, the Kulunda Steppe in southern Russia is a continuous extension of the Kazakh Steppe, which geographers agree is in Central Asia. The Kulunda Steppe hosts 10-15 wild Allium species, of which those with volatile sulphur compounds were the most for masking the smell of humans.
The repellents were also known to the inhabitants of the Mikhaylovsky region who suddenly found themselves sharing their lives and, sometimes, even their housing -- such as it was -- with the "Special Settlers". Whether their supervisors allowed the workers to stop for long enough to protect themselves is another matter.
And if the workers did stop, they might miss their quote for the day, their "norm" and so receive less food as a result. It was a lose-lose situation.
The principal economic activity on the Kulunda Steppe was farming, an activity in which Jaan had life-long experience. His experience was in completely different climatic conditions, however. The best teachers were gone, as the kulaks of Russia were arrested, deported or "liquidated" in the 1930s, under Stalin's orders. Those peasants who remained were doing what they were told to do by their brigade leaders, whether it made sense or not.
As well as growing food in the short summer, the workers were expected to engage in tree-felling during the winter. Although they were further away from the Arctic Circle from the camps in which Heimar and Artur had laboured, the Kulunda Steppe's winter weather was every bit as brutal due to its location in the middle of the largest land mass in the world. And though the definition of a steppe is a grassy plain, sometimes its topography permits pockets of forests to develop.
We've seen already how dangerous tree-felling could be in the Soviet era, especially if the weather conditions allow biting insects to breed. An alternative winter occupation was stripping the farm machinery down and rebuilding it to have it ready for summer-time operation. As an older, skilled farmer, who maybe had his own machinery, perhaps Jaan was found to be more useful in this area.
Jaan survived this chaotic situation until released on 20 June 1956. Someone as smart and skilled as Jaan might have made extra money as a tractor driver, perhaps had his own plot with produce he sold to his neighbours, and sold everything he was not taking with him in order to purchase the multiple train tickets to get from Mikhaylovka to Novosibirsk, then to Moscow, to Tallinn, and finally by train, bus and ferry from Tallinn to Muhu and Saaremaa.
On Saaremaa, he lived for more than another 18 years, but in a collectivised system. He would have needed a local residence permit, but perhaps Linda's managing to stay on the island through having pneumonia when her parents were arrested was a help here. Although aged 70 when released from the Novosibirsk Oblast, he would still have been expected to work on Linda's collective farm. At least he would have been offered lighter duties, such as guarding or repairing equipment.
Unlike the two imprisoned sons who died when they were only 61 years old, Jaan managed to live until one day after his 89th birthday.
Maria was arrested at the same time as her husband and would have endured the same conditions travelling to the Novosibirsk Oblast. The records show that she too was sent to the Mikhaylovsky region and released on the same day as her husband, 20 June 1956. If this means that they were allowed to stay together, that would have been a massive help to both of them.
A female "Special Settler" would have been expected to work every bit as hard as the men. Cheerful women driving tractors or helping with the harvest were a staple of Soviet propaganda posters. Maria was 56 years old when arrested with her husband, Jaan, in March 1949. At the time of their release in June 1956, she was 63 years old. She managed to live another 9 years in the Soviet system, but mostly back in Estonia with Jaan.
When they managed to reach their home village of Leisi in 1956, the private fields they remembered from the 1940s were gone. They returned to an industrialised landscape dominated by the large fields, communal cattle barns, and heavy machinery operations of the Saare Tööline (a collective farm covering about 12,000 hectares, whose name meant Saare Worker) and the Karja state farm, used for scientific research by the Estonian Institute of Agriculture and Land Improvement.
Their daughter, Linda, seems to have landed on the Karja state farm when she had recovered from her pneumonia, being paid as a state employee. We do not know if she had been allowed back into the family home once it had been seized by the State. She might have been lucky to cover some personal belongings from it.
On 5 October 1952, she had married another Saaremaa resident, Johannes Voksepp. They were to have 2 children. The information recorded on their Geni.com pages does not include their dates of birth, so we do not know if they had been born before their grandparents returned. Artur might have been back on Saaremaa to attend the wedding, but Heimar was still imprisoned in his Arctic labour camp.
Represseeritud pereliikmed
- PR-0354361: NÕMM, JAAN. Sünd: 1886-01-13, MUSTJALA V. Isa AADA 1860. Ema REET 1862. [LEISI V kd2 lk355]
- R5-591401: NÕMM, Jaan, Ado, s. 1886, eluk. Saaremaa Leisi v. Pöitse k., asum. erin. 20.07.49; Novosibirski obl. Mihhailovka raj., vab. 20.06.56. [3767N]
- RR-0000925: NÕMM, JAAN, isa ADO. Sünd 1886-01-14. Surm 1975-01-15
