Crossed out

On the shore of Lake Baikal, a memorial to Tsarist-era Polish exiles meets an unfortunate end

In June, a memorial to the Polish exiles killed during the 1866 Baikal Insurrection was destroyed in Rechka Mishikha, one of several tiny villages perched on the southern shore of Lake Baikal that make up the Tankhoy settlement. Although it’s unclear who was responsible, it turns out that residents had been complaining about the monument for years. And their efforts to campaign against it offer a fascinating insight into how the Kremlin’s memory politics foster grassroots support for rewriting history. The Siberia-based outlet People of Baikal published a nuanced investigation into the controversy earlier this year. The following English-language translation of that article has been lightly edited and abridged for context and clarity.

This article was first published in Russian by the Siberia-based outlet People of Baikal. The following translation appeared in The Beet, a weekly email dispatch from Meduza in English covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Sign up here to get the next issue delivered directly to your inbox.

A metal marker stands in a small clearing on the shores of Lake Baikal, where the Bystraya River flows into the world’s deepest lake. The riverbank is overgrown with bushes, but there’s a trampled path coming from the nearest village. The locals come here to fish hoping to catch omul, a type of whitefish, though there are barely any left in the lake.

Apparently, this is where Tsarist troops fought rebelling Polish exiles in the summer of 1866. The Poles killed in the short-lived revolt were buried in a mass grave not far from Lake Baikal — and the metal marker supposedly indicates its location. The village of Mishikha is just a few hundred meters away.

“We’re removed from civilization altogether,” says Rakhimzhan Suleimanov, waving his hands expressively. “We don’t have schools, daycares, stores — nothing. We used to have everything, but now there’s nothing.”

Suleimanov, a 66-year-old Tatar who goes by “Uncle Roma,” came to Buryatia in the early 1970s to serve in the USSR’s Automotive Troops. He met his wife Nazira here, a fellow Tatar whom everyone in the village called “Natalia.” Her family came to Buryatia even earlier to escape famine in the Volga region. Two years ago, Nazira fell ill with the coronavirus and was shuttled back and forth to a hospital 100 kilometers (62 miles) away. She died a month later at a hospital in the regional capital, Ulan-Ude.

Mishikha is one of six small villages on the shores of Lake Baikal with a combined population of about 1,000 people, 900 of whom live in the main village of Tankhoy. The others are home to just a few dozen people each. After train service here stopped in 2013, life in the villages practically reached a standstill.

The metal marker shows where the original monument to the exiled Poles used to be, Uncle Roma says confidently. “But as far as I can remember, there was never a cross here,” he continues, adding that sometimes fresh flowers appeared. His neighbors told him they were laid there in memory of the dead.

That this could be a mass grave site doesn’t surprise Uncle Roma. He recalls what his late wife’s elderly grandfather always told him: “Son, under every railroad tie here, there’s a human life.”

‘Separatists, insurgents, and rebels’

After the January Uprising of 1863–1864 (an unsuccessful rebellion against Russian rule in partitioned Poland), the Tsarist regime exiled between 18,000 and 22,000 people to Siberia.

In 1866, a group of exiles assigned to construct the Circumbaikal Highway plotted another rebellion. They had hatched an adventurous plan: disarm the guards, ride on horseback to the Chinese border, and, from there, board English ships and return to their homeland — Poland.

On June 24, 1866, several dozen exiles working on the road near Kultuk (a village in the Irkutsk region) left their posts, captured weapons and horses, and set off eastward along Lake Baikal. The mutiny was supposed to grow into an uprising of Polish prisoners throughout eastern Siberia. But a few days later, Russian troops caught up with the rebels at the Bystraya River, 150 kilometers (93 miles) from Kultuk. A battle ensued, and 15 to 30 people died.

The surviving rebels were put on trial and publicly executed in Irkutsk, their bodies buried in an old industrial area on the city’s outskirts.

“Of course, from a 19th-century point of view, they were separatists, insurgents, and rebels. In the Soviet context, it was a struggle for your freedom and ours — a struggle against Tsarism. And if you’re looking at it from a modern point of view, then it’s a completely different situation. Right now, everything is tense and strained,” historian Evgeny Semyonov carefully explains.

Semyonov is the deputy chair of Nadzieja, a Polish cultural organization founded in Buryatia in 1993. Today, it has 37 members. “We’re Russian citizens, but we preserve and remember our roots,” explains the organization’s chair, Yulia Petelina.

According to Semyonov, the executed Polish prisoners were buried in a mass grave marked with a cross, as shown in a surviving photograph from the late 19th century. However, as one local told him, the remains were reburied in another location after the waters of Lake Baikal flooded the burial site and washed the bones away. Scientists conducting field research last documented the grave’s location in 1973. They photographed a mound where the rebels may have been buried, but it’s hard to tell its exact location. Buryatia’s list of cultural heritage sites catalogs the mass grave as a “lost object” located 300 meters (328 yards) east of Mishikha station, near the railway track.

In 2001, the Polish authorities helped finance the construction of a memorial cross in Rechka Mishikha, a village five kilometers (three miles) from the battle’s presumed location. The cross stood above a marble plaque affixed to a concrete mound covered in large stones. According to Semyonov, the monument’s location was “purely symbolic” and in no way connected to the site of the mass grave.

‘A provocative act’

The memorial cross annoyed locals almost immediately.

Every year, in early July, a delegation from the Polish cultural organization would visit the cross for a commemorative ceremony and hold a memorial dinner at a nearby campsite. Locals would peek through the fence to see the spread. They describe the memorial dinners as “real feasts” and claim that the Poles who came from Ulan-Ude drank a lot.

Evgenia Shelest, a local councilwoman in Rechka Mishikha, says she began receiving complaints about the monument immediately after she became a deputy. “I’d be walking with my kids, and locals would come up to me and say, ‘Evgenia, we don’t like that it’s still standing.’”

Most of the complaints came from the village’s summer residents, Shelest explains. Only 13 people live in Rechka Mishikha all year round, six of whom belong to the deputy’s family. The summer residents own different types of homes, but they all have extra space to accommodate relatives from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other major cities who come to vacation on Lake Baikal. The land here doesn’t come cheap — a dilapidated, 30-square-meter (300-square-foot) house far from the lake costs around $20,000.

“Every year, they [the Poles] come here to celebrate and lay wreaths! We went to [Lake] Baikal, looked, and there were nuns, the cross, and music was playing from a speaker. Our eyes bulged: Who gave them the right?” recalls Lyudmila, a retiree from Ulan-Ude who owns a dacha closer to the highway.

“Of course, it’s very convenient for them: a federal highway, a gorgeous, quiet place. It’s as if we’re being pushed to the side, even though this is our land,” Lyudmila fumes.

In 2021, locals discovered that the Poles had come to pay their respects not in July, as usual, but late in the evening on Victory Day, May 9, when Russians celebrate the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany. They noticed the fresh wreaths at the memorial cross on the morning of May 10. “We have our holiday, and they have their memorial day. They came deliberately to make a point. Even to me, this felt unpleasant, like a provocative act,” Shelest recalls.

After Victory Day in 2021, residents began their campaign against the Polish memorial in earnest and officially appealed to their local deputy. Lyudmila wrote a letter arguing that “Poland is our enemy, an unfriendly state, and nobody shot any Poles in [this] village.” At least 15 people signed the letter, she says.

“Before that, people had only told me verbally that they didn’t like that it [the memorial] looked like a grave. They said that this is a place for people to vacation. And when Russophobic hysteria kicked off in Poland, the patriotic feelings people already had started coming back up. They started to remember their fathers and grandfathers, who fought in the Great Patriotic War — people started to feel a sense of injustice,” Shelest says.

The councilwoman brought the appeal to the Kabansky district administration, which initiated an inquiry into Nadzieja, but the Polish cultural organization had allegedly changed its address, and district officials couldn’t even find its phone number. (The organization’s chair, Yulia Petelina, says she never received any communications.) In the end, the case fell by the wayside.

Smashed to pieces

At least two memorials commemorating Poles and Lithuanians have been destroyed in the Irkutsk region since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In May, someone dismantled a Polish monument and a Lithuanian cross commemorating the victims of Joseph Stalin’s 1937 terror interred at a mass grave site in Pivovarikha. And in the Ziminsky district, a court ordered the demolition of a monument at a local cemetery that bore the names of 107 victims of Stalinist repressions. According to Evgeny Semyonov, local activists have also been campaigning for years to remove Polish graves from a cemetery in Buryatia’s Tunkinsky district.

In early June 2022, while sunbathing on the shore of Lake Baikal with her neighbors, Lyudmila noticed that the memorial cross had been wrapped in a Polish flag. Enraged, she went over to the mound and, grasping the wooden cross, ripped down the red-and-white banner and threw it in the trash, along with a wreath bedecked with ribbons and inscriptions in Polish. However, she didn’t write any more letters of complaint.

One year later, on June 1, 2023, residents of Rechka Mishikha and neighboring Mishikha organized a gathering. Only a dozen or so people came, Uncle Roma recalls. As usual, they complained about the poorly cleared roads in the winter — and about the Polish cross. Tankhoy settlement head Marina Titoruk says locals again expressed their discontent over the Victory Day incident two years prior. “What disregard for our victory! It’s tasteless, [the Poles] are doing this on purpose to upset us and demean the memory of our ancestors,” locals reportedly told Titoruk.

Almost immediately after the gathering, the cross disappeared: Someone chopped it off at the base. All that remained was the concrete mound and scattered wreaths.

Semyonov says he had feared the cross would be vandalized, but he never thought it would be destroyed completely. “It was a fact of history. These things should still be noted somehow. But now this memorial site in Mishikha wasn’t just ruined, it was smashed to pieces. Someone probably thought it was an appropriate response to the way they treat Soviet monuments in Poland,” the historian says.

Since 2016, Poland has permitted the demolition of Communist-era monuments under a law prohibiting the promotion of totalitarian ideology. This process accelerated after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In 2022, the head of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, Karol Nawrocki, said the authorities planned to tear down 60 monuments to Soviet troops. Four memorials to Red Army soldiers were demolished that October.

‘These bastards want to finish off Russia’

While some locals are glad the Polish monument was destroyed, others appear indifferent. Only Marina Titoruk openly condemns it. “We have a bloody history, but it’s ours, so why pull the wool over people’s eyes and say something didn’t happen?” she asks rhetorically.

“It bothered us morally! Because somewhere deep within Russia, there’s a little village where they come hanging their Polish flags under our noses,” Lyudmila says, cursing. “There were absolutely no Poles here. There were no battles! We’re all outraged!”

While Lyudmila concedes that the Polish exiles did exist and that many of them did good things — teaching in schools, working as doctors — she insists that “peace is impossible now.” “Everyone here hates the Poles. The memory of our fathers has risen from the depths of our souls. These bastards want to finish off Russia.”

Shelest doesn’t believe that local retirees could have sawed off the cross. In all likelihood, it was soldiers on leave from the frontline, she speculates. The local deputy adds that she doesn’t oppose the monument but thinks it should stand “in the historically accurate place” — namely, the neighboring village of Mishikha.

Titoruk also thinks the monument should be restored but doesn’t know where to put it.

“We’ll set it up in your village,” she tells Uncle Roma.

But Uncle Roma waves his hands and says his village doesn’t want the monument either. At the same time, he admits he was impressed when he first saw it. “I thought, look at that. How beautiful: a marble slab and a huge cross. I forget what it said. Something like — they fought for life, and they were heroes, I think.” Asked if the memorial bothered him, Uncle Roma replies, “Nah.”

At first, Lyudmila theorizes that the Poles demolished the monument themselves. (Allegedly, the marble plaque wasn’t broken but carefully removed.) But then she gets heated and suggests that “partisans came and chopped it down.” The concrete mound will also be removed, she adds.

“An excavator will be put to work, and it will be demolished. We want to put up something athletic — for working out,” she says, vigorously moving her arms as if she were on an exercise machine. “That’s better than crosses, especially Polish ones.”

Asked how she would feel if the monument were to be restored, Lyudmila grows silent and then turns serious. “We’ll blow it up in the night,” she replies.

Story by Alina Golovina for People of Baikal

Abridged translation by Sasha Slobodov for The Beet