Lipukhin Pavel Afanasyevich

He was born in 1906 to a family of farmers. He was eager for knowledge all his life, studied in Tomsk and Leningrad, wanted to become a writer, but fate decreed otherwise: he graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Water Transport. Returning to Tomsk, he worked as an engineer at the Tomsk River Port: he mechanized the difficult work of loaders, for which he was called a "revolutionary in production". In the spring of 1937, he was summoned to Novosibirsk, to the shipping company and was offered to urgently go to Barnaul, help repair and start up the mechanisms at the Barnaul pier. There he was arrested. On November 24, 1937, the troika of the NKVD Directorate for the Altai Territory sentenced him to 10 years of imprisonment, followed by deprivation of rights for 5 years, under Article 58-2-7-8-9-11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR.

He served his sentence in Kolyma. He was a man of great fortitude, confident that nothing would happen to him. And, indeed, nothing could affect him, a seasoned athlete who swam in the Ob until the very frosts. The prisoners around him were dying of typhus one after another, but he survived. One day he was put in a cold isolation cell. When he began to feel sleepy and had an unbearable desire to lie down on the icy floor and fall asleep, he knew that if he fell asleep, it would be death, and he began to frantically toss and turn: a fight with sleep and death.

When the war began, many prisoners wrote statements asking to be sent to the front to wash away their "guilt" by defending the Motherland with blood. Pavel Lipukhin wrote many times, but there was no answer. "We would not have spared our strength to defend the Motherland. In addition to "enemies of the people", they added the nickname "fascists" to us, it was unbearable to hear this," he recalled with late remorse that he himself, when Tukhachevsky, Blucher and many others were declared "enemies of the people", condemned them. Only when he got into their shoes, he realized what it meant to bear a terrible and unfair stigma.

His love for writing did not dry up even in prison. Through the gloomy everyday life, filled with exhausting labor and inhuman living conditions, the light of memories shone through, illuminating his poetry. Due to constant searches, he had to hide his poems behind a patch in his shoe, but he could no longer live without poetry.

After his release, he worked in Kolyma for another 7 years, not having received permission to return to his homeland. Only after Stalin's death did he receive a passport and was rehabilitated. Over the course of 17 years, his strength had been exhausted, and he descended the gangway to his native land on his knees - his legs had given out. But his vitality and will remained: he knew that he would overcome his illness. He brought himself back to normal through intensive training.

In addition to his love of literature and thirst for life, he had another passion: the desire for knowledge. After Kolyma, Pavel Afanasyevich again pounced on his studies, for which he was also punished more than once. Working in the Tomsk River Shipping Company on a voluntary basis, he collected materials on the history of river shipping, which became the basis for the river fleet history museum created with his participation; he collected exhibits and materials on the history of the Komsomol organization of Tomsk and opened this museum twice on a voluntary basis; he wrote poetry and prose memoirs. He combined his works "The Court Is Swift and Unjust", "Kolyma", "Two Years" under one title "Three Steps of Hell" and published it at his own expense as a separate brochure, published a book of poems.

Having survived the Gulag, he remained faithful to communist ideals as in his youth; in the 1990s, he refused to join the Gulag Prisoners Association organized in Tomsk, and also refused, on principle, to accept assistance from the Solzhenitsyn Foundation.

P. A. Lipukhin lived a long life, five months short of a hundred years old, and died almost at the same time as his ninety-year-old wife.

Source: Museum archive.