Tragic events near Baikal

Baikalskoye is a village which is situated on the shore of Lake Baikal not far from River Goremyka (a poor-wretch). Till 1934 the village and the river were namesakes. Their names are connected with the hard life of the Baikal fishermen. The latter were sent to the North of Lake Baikal in great numbers as there was an abundant of fish there. Usually in autumn they were coming back to Irkutsk, right when it was the time of severe storms. That is why they suffer a lot of grief and pain in these places with severe wind blowing all the time.

In fact a lot of Baikal Siberia people were suffering. Some of them came to live here sua sponte, and some – against their will. Very tragic events took place to the North of the lake in April 1912. They are known as Lensk Events. It was when more than 2500 workers of the Nadezhdinsk gold fields started to demand the improvement of unbearable labor and life conditions. They were shot by soldiers. The tragic event ended with 270 killed and 250 wounded. At the bottom of the strike was the event that shows very clearly how indifferent were the employers to the life and needs of workers. At the end of February the workers of the gold fields received their dietary with rotten meat. One of the workers even found a generative organ in his dietary. They tried to exchange this meat for a good one, but fail. It was the last straw…

There were some other tragic events in the northern part of the Baikal; one of them happened in the Soviet time with prisoners. There is the Tonki (thin) Cape and Slyudansk Bay between the village of Baikalsk and the town of Severobaikalsk. Not far from them there are Slyudansk Lakes with old deserted mica mines near them. In them in the 30s of the 20th century prisoners mined mica and dragged on a wretched existence in camps that reminded concentration ones by the condition of living. Even now one can see deep niches in the hard rock and at their walls there are half rotten plank beds overgrown with green moss. At the foot of the high mountain the prisoners of the camp made up three mine galleries, out of which they pulled iron buckets with the solid and picked out big pieces of mica. The superhuman labor ended with the workers killing their guides and scattered around the taiga.

See also

• The Many Faces of Multilingual and Mysterious Baikal. A.D.Karnyshev

Literature

1. A.D. Karnyshev "The Many Faces of Multilingual and Mysterious Baikal"© BSU Publishing House, 2011