Documents of the Tomsk transit prison

The inventory contains documents from 51 personal files, concerning 69 prisoners (the defendants in the case and their accomplices, mentioned in some documents), for the period from 1940 to 1951. The bulk of the documents (more than 90%) relate to the initial period of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1942).

Characteristics of the prisoner population. The documents reflect the complex composition of the special prison population at Tomsk Prison No. 3 during the war.

Ethnic composition : representatives of 10 nationalities, including Russians (39 people - 56.5%), Poles (9 people - 13%), Germans (6 people - 8.7%), Ukrainians (5 people - 7.2%), Jews, as well as Bashkirs, Belarusians, Slovaks, Finns, and Estonians.

Geography : residents of war-torn regions (Leningrad and the region, Zhitomir, Kiev, Vinnytsia regions of the Ukrainian SSR), interned citizens of Poland, as well as special settlers and residents of the Tomsk district.

Social and legal status : Red Army soldiers, skilled workers, teachers, university associate professors, religious ministers and persons detained for crossing the state border.

Age characteristics:

The calculation was made for 66 people (for 3 people, data on the year of birth is missing).

• Average age: 42.2 years.
• The oldest: 71 years old (Pundel K. D., born in 1871).
• The youngest: 20 years old (Shmelev V.A., born in 1922).

Analysis of Fates. Distribution of Final Decisions or Outcomes by Category:

• Deaths in custody/transit: 41 people (according to those involved in the cases, this constitutes 80%). This is the largest group; the majority of deaths occurred in Tomsk hospitals in 1941–1942.
• Sentenced to forced labor camps (from 3 to 10 years): 11 people (15.9%).
• Released (mostly Polish citizens): 9 people (13.0%).
• Execution by firing squad/death by death penalty: 4 people (5.8%).
• Acquitted: 1 person (Odintsov Ya.P.).
• Fate not determined (defendants, accomplices): 3 people (Tsengub-Goren, Golshtayn, Bondarchuk).

Case content : The majority of these cases are brought under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR and Article 54 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR (counterrevolutionary activity, anti-Soviet agitation), as well as cases against military personnel accused of desertion. The case materials contain information about the living conditions of prisoners evacuated from the western regions of the USSR to Siberia.

All of these files were discovered by chance by staff at Tomsk Pretrial Detention Center No. 1 in 2023 in a half-flooded room in one of the facility's buildings. Due to fungal attack and the loss of some materials, they were deemed unsuitable for archival storage and were written off and subject to destruction. At the request of Memorial Museum staff members V. Uimanov and V. Khanevich, they were preserved and transferred to the museum for study. The documents were scanned by V. Khanevich in 2025.