The two guests from Magnitogorsk : PhD Salavat Kharisovich Akhmetzyanov and editor of “Tatar Ruhy ” Ravil Gataullaevich Khusnutdinov visited the executive committee of the World Congress of Tatars . They met with the First Deputy Chairman of the EC WCT. Guests expect to receive in the Congress of Tatars and assistance in that big business, for which they came .

In May of this year in Magnitogorsk opened a branch of the Institute of History named Sh.Mardjani . It was created in order to explore possible during the construction of Magnitogorsk , to identify the real role and number of Tatars , who were dispossessed in Tatarstan and forcibly sent to the construction of the ” garden city ” . Although this is not to say the general public today is no longer a secret of the fact that the city and its industrial facilities were built by hands of special settlers and repressed . Branch , while there were only two employees ( Salavat Kharisovich – the supervisor , Ravil Gataullaevich – Director) , busy determining the

exact number of dispossessed of Tatarstan , submitted for the construction of Magnitogorsk , and the volume of work they produced . Since May, held a considerable amount of work , analyzed the literature on the repressed , studied archival materials .

“We – the direct descendants of the dispossessed . Our mothers , fathers in the small age and their families were forcibly brought to Magnitogorsk. Historical memory of the role of special settlers in the construction of the city and its industrial facilities damped . There are separate , short mention, but there is no detailed study on the size and etc. Up to now, the city is not even a small monument to the victims of repression , repressed builders of Magnitogorsk. Our goal – to create a memorial , this year , on October 30 a day of memory of victims of political repression plan to put a memorial stone at the site of the future memorial. If the help from Tatarstan would be good to make a documentary film, ” – said Ravil Khusnutdinov .

Salavat Akhmetzyanov talked about some horrible facts of life repressed first, builders of Magnitogorsk .

“I was born in Magnitogorsk left bank districts , home to more than a thousand families dispossessed of Tatarstan. Mama brought there in the summer of 1931 at the age of 3 years old, my father at the age of 5 years. It was a Tatar village . My first speech was the Tatar language. We grew up among Tatar songs , fables. legends , reading the Koran …

According to our data from May to September 1931 in Magnitogorsk arrived , more were forcibly sent about 50,000 of the dispossessed , and most of them were from Tatarstan . We have carefully analyzed the Memory Book of Tatarstan on the dispossessed and came to the conclusion that all of the 350,000 dispossessed, peasants over the years is not less than a quarter were sent to the Chelyabinsk region , of which about 40,000 – to Magnitogorsk .

These people took an active part in the construction of our city. They were involved in the most difficult jobs : ground and concrete . As the living conditions were extremely difficult , as special immigrants lived in poorly heated barracks in unsanitary conditions and overcrowding limit , with poor nutrition and poor health

care , all this led to mass mortality. In 1931 and especially in 1932, an epidemic of typhoid and typhus , tuberculosis claimed thousands of lives. In addition there were mass escapes. So after three and a half years after the appearance of the special settlers on Magnitogorsk , by the end of 1934 they remained subject to reference the NKVD only 24,000 people. Single family in this time had 3.4 persons , while our analysis at the time of dispossession in Tatarstan and sent to the Chelyabinsk region of the Tatar population of peasant families had an average of 8.1 people .

Winter of 1931-32 years, according to eyewitnesses in Magnitogorsk resembled the siege of Leningrad : on the streets, the roads lay the mass of bodies of people who died of hunger and cold, disease . Commando teams go, collected corpses were buried in mass graves. According to official data, in 1931, killed more than thousands of infants under 1 year old , in 1932 – more than two thousand … ”

 Author: Alfiya Minnullina