The Mystery of the Mass Grave.
For many years, Bubuyra Kydyralieva could not share her secret. No one wanted to listen; she was not taken seriously. Yet she wanted to find someone who could investigate the tragic story she had remembered since she was 10 years old.
Everything changed with her acquaintance with a young careerist from the KGB. Bolot Abdrakhmanov knew how to listen to the end. "I met with Bubuyra-ezhe at a time when Gorbachev began to implement democratic reforms. She said that her father told her that victims of Stalin's repressions were buried where she played as a child. The Kydyralievs had kept silent about this for 53 years," Abdrakhmanov recounts.
No Graves, No Crosses
In a small room on the third floor of the State Security Committee building, we watch a video cassette recording of the witness testimony of Byubuyra Kydyralieva, the daughter of the only witness to the finale of the tragedy that unfolded according to the scripts of the distant '38: after the excavation near the tourist base "Chon-Tash," the investigation can report that bodies were dumped into the brick kiln in the early days of November.
The witness answers questions from KGB officers Rakhimzhan Askarov and Bolot Abdrakhmanov. The video camera follows the woman: here, on the territory of the tourist base, which was then a rest house of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, there stood a two-story building, and over there was a bathhouse. The witness had not been here since 1940—the very year when her father, having written a letter to Vasily Ivanovich Klipachev, the chairman of the collective farm in Vorontsovka, took the family away from these places, burying deep in memory what he had witnessed during several November nights of '38.
- Why was this place chosen, near "their" rest house? - I ask Bolot, who is also watching the video recording.
- Precisely because the place was indeed familiar. It was well guarded, and there were no outsiders nearby. By the way, there is even a pattern to this: we contacted colleagues from other republics. It turned out that very often in the '40s, NKVD officers "covered up" traces in the same way: they took bodies out of the city and buried them near their rest houses, sanatoriums, and tourist bases. That's the first reason.
Secondly, the place was very convenient for the "action" also because there was a small brick kiln workshop here. Remember, in the very first hours of the excavation, we stumbled upon brickwork?
Abdrakhmanov draws a rectangle, explaining: the width is 3.4 meters, the length is 3.6.
- This is the shaft of the kiln where the bricks were fired. We also dug up its door: seventy to eighty centimeters high, forty wide, and about a meter thick. From the surface to a depth of almost three and a half meters, this well was filled with human remains. We reached the very bottom—cement or stone. And the deeper we dug, the more items we found: toothbrushes, several coins from '28, '32, and '37, bundles with tobacco pouches and wooden spoons, aluminum and enameled mugs and bowls. There were many padded jackets, tubeteikas, shoes—mostly Asian galoshes. We dug up a small shoe with a low heel, size thirty-six. Even scraps of women's national stockings with a characteristic pattern were preserved. We found visors from caps—like those that Stalin liked to wear.
... The deeper we went, the more intact the remains of clothing were.
On one of the last days, at a depth of about three meters, Bolot saw a half-decayed padded jacket. He lifted it... and bones fell out. Then someone scooped up a thin layer of soil here. And suddenly Rakhimzhan Askarov said loudly:
- Be careful, look—paper!
Thus, they found the first indictment...
Bolot has noticeably changed since the day when, quickly changing into a tracksuit and putting on a sports cap with a long visor, he, along with Moskalev, made the first shovels on one of the slopes of the Chon-Tash hills. Within two weeks, the number of discovered remains became three digits. More than one hundred twenty preserved skulls and many fragments unsuitable for forensic examination were extracted from the ground.
In two weeks, Bolot saw what an ordinary person—not an archaeologist, not a forensic expert, not a criminologist—would not see in a lifetime. His colleagues say that in the evenings, Abdrakhmanov returned to the Committee blackened...
Once, long ago, these items were things necessary for human life. Toothbrushes, tobacco pouches, glass from glasses, matches, coins, mouthpieces. They were bought, received, gifted, embroidered with dear names and surnames.
"In paper bag No. 6 are three mouthpieces extracted during the excavation regarding the discovery of the burial..."
"In paper bag No. 7 is..." It took half a century and three more years for the items to finally become material evidence. The group created for the investigation of criminal case No. 173-91-01, initiated due to the discovery of the burial, which includes investigators from the KGB and the prosecutor's office, operational workers from the KGB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, was headed by the investigator for particularly important cases under the prosecutor of Chui region, Shailoobek Aymambetov.
And again, the investigator carefully unfolds the paper. Inside is a half-decayed piece of fabric in a protective color: a belt from trousers, or perhaps a collar from a shirt or tunic. On the inside, large letters embroidered in black thread clearly spell out the surname: Sultanbekov.
Indictments extracted during the excavations are carefully laid out on paper. The surnames and names of the accused are easily read on them, as well as the date of their preparation and various articles under which they were charged—the very same fifty-eighth article that condemned to eternal darkness of oblivion—without graves and crosses—hundreds of thousands of lives, creating on one-sixth of the planet an unimaginable archipelago: of human bones.
The "political" article, cloaked in legislative garb, served as an instrument of mass terror, mowing down indiscriminately. And those who were "doomed" by origin, faith, due to an awkwardly spoken word, an ill-timed joke, or simply because a neighbor took a dislike, and those who were obliged to "mow" by virtue of their service.
In November '37, the former Minister of Internal Affairs of the Kyrgyz SSR, Chetvertakov, was arrested by the NKVD for disrupting the exposure of enemies of the people in the republic, for connections with counter-revolutionaries and Trotskyists. The verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR was executed immediately—on February 26, '39. The family was informed that the convicted person died in custody in November '30... Fifty-eighth—without graves, without crosses.
According to the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB) of the NKVD of the USSR, Kyrgyzstan was entangled in networks of counter-revolutionary underground, organizations of the Social-Turanian party, Trotskyists, agents of Chinese and British intelligence, saboteurs, terrorists, Alash-Orda members, and simply saboteurs.
Captain of state security Chetvertakov shot enemies of the people poorly.
Colonel of state security Lotsmanov, who took office as Minister of Internal Affairs of the Kyrgyz SSR in September '37, shot, unlike his predecessor, well.
Unprecedented waves of repression, marked by cruelty and cynicism, descended upon the mountainous region.
The sprawling signature of Colonel Lotsmanov, approving the indictment, is on each of the four fragile and brittle dark brown sheets. Since November '38, they lay in the ground and were preserved, probably because they were at a great depth in a stone-brick well. So, were the bodies of the executed, in whose clothing pockets these ominous papers were found, the first to be dumped into the depths of the brick kiln? So, were they "loaded" last into the covered truck that brought this monstrous cargo on that cold November night of '38 to Chon-Tash?
Many questions, apparently, will remain unanswered.
There is probably no one left to ask and no one to answer: the closest relatives who were adults in '38 are no longer alive.
And many of those who carried out the orders are also gone. And those who remain, I think, are in no hurry to share their memories with either the prosecutor's office or the editorial office.
But a criminal case has been initiated.
This means that questions must be answered.
Shailoobek Aymambetov:
- First of all, we must try to establish the identities of the repressed. For this, more than ten expert examinations have been appointed: forensic medical, physical-technical, ballistic—one of the skulls contained a bullet, criminological, technical, and others.
Secondly, we need to study their criminal cases: were they legally convicted, was the investigation conducted properly?
Thirdly, we need to establish the names of the people who conducted the investigation, the court, and carried out the sentence. We have requested documents from the republic's archives, including criminal cases from the KGB archive.
On the investigator's desk is an archival volume of a criminal case with the printed letters "NKVD" on the cover. This case was requested from the KGB archive by Aymambetov, "having obtained" the indictment from the ground, in fact—from the other world.
What kind of person was the convicted individual? How convincingly was his guilt proven? Are his relatives alive? How to find people who were involved in his case in one way or another?
But all these questions can only arise after a positive answer to the most essential, fundamental question: does the indictment "belong" to the very person whose remains were found here?
How to identify them with the identity of the repressed without witness testimonies, photographs, data on special features of the skull? It is precisely based on this, with the presence of many additional details, that forensic experts can attempt to establish the identity of a specific person.
According to the investigator, lists of the repressed, "buried" in November '38 at Chon-Tash, have not yet been found in the archives. The only hope so far is for witness testimonies:
We have already interrogated some of the old-timers from the nearest villages. And we still hope for the criminal cases of those for whom these four indictments were issued. For example, in this one—Aymambetov picks up an archival volume—there are references to specific surnames, names, addresses. Any lead is important for us. Witness testimonies directly or indirectly related to the events of November '38 are crucial.
It is necessary to obtain as much additional information as possible, - says Gennady Arkadyevich Malinin, a police major, an operative officer of the criminal investigation department of the Chui region.
He listened to our conversation in silence. And, despite considerable experience in operational-investigative work to establish the identities of those who will never speak again, the difficult, harsh topic of conversation seemed to concern Malinin as well. He was also at the site of the remains' extraction. It would seem that such work could become routine...
I had to hear the opinion that, - I tell Gennady Arkadyevich, - it was unnecessary to start these excavations.
Who needs all this now...
- No, - says Malinin, - I disagree. There are no indifferent people. You know how it sometimes happens in our work?
A misfortune occurs—a person goes missing. We search for him by all available means, interviewing witnesses, printing photographs in newspapers, giving announcements on television. And, to be honest, we do not always find them. And then relatives come to us and say: at least find us some bones. So that there is somewhere to go.
To lay flowers...
At the site of the mass grave, the Kyrgyz authorities conducted a reburial and on August 30, 1991, opened the memorial complex in memory of the victims of Stalin's repressions "Ata-Beyit."