Sofia Korzun’s Request to the Chief Camps’ Authority for Reconsideration of Oleg’s Case, 1938

Moscow. Chief Camps’ Authority
[from] Citizen Sofia Vasilievna Korzun
Kazakhstan, Pavlodar, the village of Ermak, Lenina St., the house of Shkalikova,
S. V. Korzun

I am asking you to reconsider the case of my son, Oleg Vyacheslavovich Korzun. He was arrested on November 4, 1937, at 6.30 AM under the circumstances which are rather unusual for an arrest; therefore I did not immediately understand this was an arrest. The citizen who arrested him introduced himself as a criminal investigation agent; he did not perform any search and invited my son to accompany him to the house committee, saying my son will be back shortly. But my son never came back. And he left right after had waken up, without even getting dressed properly, or taking with him any clothes or money.

For a long time my inquiries at the Criminal investigation did not bring any results, until I was finally told to look for my son at NKVD. At the end of December, his case was found at Novokuznetskaya, at the Moscow Prosecutor’s office; there I was told that he was sent into exile and I should wait for a letter from him. In March I was told the same, that he was sent to a labor camp, and that I should wait for a letter. Nevertheless, after I was told so, I managed to find him in the Taganskaya prison on March 8, and they accepted one parcel from me there.

Later, in the Matrosskaya Tishina St. I was again told “he was sent to a labor camp, wait for a letter”. But I never received a letter from him. And in June 1938, my husband, Vyacheslav Karlovich Korzun was arrested, and 4 months later, on October 4, 1938 I was arrested myself. At present I am in Kazakhstan, Pavlodar region, in the village of Ermak where I was sent into a 3 years’ exile, and am now working as an accountant.

From here, too, I made inquiries about my son, and I was told he was convicted and sentenced to serve his sentence in remote labor camps, without the right for correspondence. I do not know, where he was sent, for how long, and what for. I have also suffered another blow – I do not know my husband’s whereabouts or his sentence either, but my grief for my son overwhelms.

My son was 24 when he was arrested. Of course, on the one hand, this is an adult age, but still he is a very young person, who has not even completed his education yet, he has not seen almost anything in life, and he was indeed very much of simply a child.

He was born in 1913, more exactly in the very end of 1912, almost on the eve of the Revolution, and, consequently, in his conscious age he did not know anything but the Revolutionary era.

Before school, I was educating him myself, and at home he was under no harmful influence. Later, school had a strong effect on him, which I never opposed.

In the ideological sense, my son was a completely Soviet person, and I am deeply convinced that he could not commit any anti-Soviet crime. Because if he is sentenced to a term in remote labor camps without the right to receive letters, it means he is accused of something terrible. I think this is a fatal misunderstanding. I repeat, neither at home, in his childhood, nor later did he see anything hostile, anti-Soviet.

He had a lot of friends and acquaintances among the Soviet youth, and almost all guests at our house were young, because my husband and I did not almost have any friends in common, and we did not visit anybody together, because both my husband and I were each attending to our own work.
Young people came to our house to study and to have a good time; they were discussing many different things – studies, work, theatre, literature, music, social life, and of course sports and mountaineering. My son loved mountaineering; he studied to become a mountaineering instructor, and worked as instructor in the mountaineering camps in the Caucasus. And no anti-Soviet atmosphere was ever present in our house, and nothing in the young people’s conversations was hostile to the Soviet regime.

At present, I do not know anything about my son; I do not know whether he is alive. But I cannot stand this any longer. He has never even started any serious work, he did not represent anything, he had no meaning whatsoever, and he was the smallest fry in the Soviet Union. What dreadful thing could he do to deserve such a terrible punishment?

Please allow me to learn where he is.

I ask you very much to reconsider my son’s case. I am not asking you to whiten the black, but it is not as black as it seemed to be.

S. Korzun