Why is Palochka a museum of dispossessed people?
Palochka is a small village in the Tomsk region on the banks of a tributary of the Ket River. A hundred years ago, the dense taiga rustled here, but the first residents arrived after Stalin's collectivization. In the spring of 1931, dispossessed kulaks from the Altai were brought here by barge.
Now in the village lives about 200 people. Among the attractions is the only "Center for the Memory of Dispossessed People" in Russia, housed in a former school building. It was created and have opened In 2020, local residents Irina Yanchenko и Gulnara KoryaginaThere might as well have been no center. Everyone knew that the village was founded by special settlers. But in 2018, search teams discovered mass graves of special settlers. These weren't proper graves, but small pits 40 centimeters deep. Nearby were other pits—dugouts—where the special settlers tried to survive. The search team's work revealed that the burial site in Palochka— the largest In Siberia, there is a "mass grave" of special settlers.
94 years ago here dropped off 7800 people, of whom 700 survived. Some died from hunger, cold, and illness, while others tried to escape and died in the taiga. According to the memories One of those exiled here as a child even ate dead horses, which arrived here along with the living on a barge. The dead were buried without ritual or ceremony, while the survivors, under the supervision of NKVD officers, built the commandant's office, barracks, and infrastructure. In the following years, "enemies of the people" continued to be sought and found among the special settlers, who ended their lives in the same mass graves.
Most of Palochka's residents are descendants of those settlers, but not everyone supported the museum's creation. The village head even claimed that the remains of the dead were victims of Kolchak's troops. Surprisingly, the center was opened with funds from a presidential grant. wrote central media. In 2023 here opened a square with a monument "Family Trouble".
Hundreds of descendants of dispossessed peasants from all over the world come here to learn about the fate of their ancestors and pay their respects to the dead. Meanwhile, attitudes toward the organizers of the museum center have become sharply negative: the topic of repression and dispossessed peasants has become deeply "foreign agent" and once again taboo.
