Dmitry Anisimovich Melnik was born in 1880 in the small town of Stara Ushitsa, Ukraine to Anisim Melnik and Marta Zaombyborshch. He came from a family described as serednyaks—middle-class peasants—people who were neither landless nor elite, but who lived by steady work, land, and reputation in their community. Later, under Soviet rule, people like Dmirty would lose everything.
According to our family's oral history, Dmitry, his brother Stepan, and their nephew, my great-grandfather, Arseny Melnik journeyed to Canada for economic reasons. Dmitry and Stepan returned home to Stara Ushitsa, but my great-grandfather remained and later immigrated to America. We never knew what happened to Dmitry, until I found his name on Alex Krakovky's website, which included in a list of repressed persons from the Khlmelnytskyi Archives. I then contracted with Dorosh Heritage Tours, whom I used in the past to request and provide me with a digital copy of Dmitry's file. The whole process only took a couple of weeks and I received Dmitry's sixty page file last Friday.
Dmitry, journeyed to Canada in 1909. This kind of journey was not unusual at the time. For many Ukrainians, Canada was a place to earn money, test possibilities, and then decide whether to stay or return to the homeland. According to his file, sometime in 1912, Dmitry returned to Ukraine; however, I wonder if this date is incorrect, because his nephew, Arseny did not arrive in Canada until 1912. After returning to Stara Ushitsa, Dmitry owned 5-7 hectares of land and rented out some hectares to other farmers, he owned a molotarka or threshing machine used to separate grain from the stalks, a workshop, pair of horses, and cows and bulls.
By the end of the 1920s, the world around him changed rapidly. In 1929, Dmitry joined the local kolkhoz, the Soviet collective farm. Officially, kolkhozes were presented as cooperative and voluntary. In reality, joining was often the only way to avoid immediate punishment by the Soviet authorities. For peasants like Dmitry, participation did not mean security. The working class was subject to quotas, surveillance, and political labeling that could change overnight.
In August 1933, during the height of collectivization and the Holodomor famine, Dmitry was expelled from the kolkhoz as a “kulak.” In Russian "kulak" literally means "fist" so this implied that he was someone who was tight-fisted or greedy and a class enemy. Peasants who were slightly wealthier than their neighbors were viewed as capitalists who stood in the way of Socialism. He was also designated a tverdozadanie, or a tax quota in grain, meat, or money that would be impossible for any farmer to pay. When Dmitry failed to produce the required amount, he was stripped of his voting rights, and his property was sold off. To avoid exile to the North (Siberia), Dmitry fled.
In 1933, Dmitry fled by swimming across the Dniester River into Bessarabia (then Romania, but now part of Moldova) with his wife Emilia, his brother Stepan, and several close relatives from Stepan’s family, including his son Spiridon and sons-in-law Alexey Kushnir and Bronislav Komarnitsky. It was a dangerous decision, and almost immediately after crossing into Bessarabia he was detained by border guards where he was interrogated and later had to face trial for entering the country illegally.
Dmitry was permitted to remain in Bessarabia. From 1933 until 1940, Dmitry lived in the village of Romankovtsya. There, he worked as a shoemaker and a tenant farmer. His brother Stepan's family setted in the town of Perlita and he mentioned another nephew Petro, son of his brother, Stakh, lived in the city of Beltsy. Life in Romankovtsy was modest and insecure. As a refugee from Soviet territory, he lived under Romanian rule without strong legal protection, watched by local authorities and surrounded by suspicion from all sides. Still, compared to famine-stricken Soviet Ukraine, it was a place where he could work and provide food for his family.
That fragile stability ended in June 1940, when the Soviet Union occupied Bessarabia.
On June 30, 1940, Dmitry was detained by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). He was taken to the former Catholic monastery of the Dominican sisters that Soviet authorities converted into the Kamianets‑Podilskyi state prison. Many political prisoners were interrogated or shot in the torture chamber in its underground cells.
Arrest warrant for Dmitry.
On July 4, 1940, the Kamenets-Podolsk regional NKVD issued a formal arrest resolution. Dmitry was charged under three articles of the Soviet criminal code: illegal border crossing, espionage, and anti-Soviet agitation. These charges, often used together, did not require concrete proof of harm—only unfounded allegations were enough to subject workers like Dmitry to labor camps or even death.
During interrogations in July and August 1940, Dmitry admitted to crossing the border in 1933 to escape repression. He acknowledged that Romanian police had questioned him at that time about Soviet troop locations but denied agreeing to spy. He also admitted that he told people life in the Soviet Union was bad, citing hunger and forced collectivization. To the NKVD, such statements alone could be treated as criminal.
Witnesses were produced on both sides of the border. In Stara Ushitsa, former neighbors described him as a kulak, an exploiter, and an enemy of the Soviet system. In Romankovtsy, villagers testified that he associated with the local Romanian gendarmerie chief, visited the police station, and spoke openly about suffering in the USSR. These testimonies reflected not only Dmitry’s words and actions, but also the pressures on witnesses themselves in a system that rewarded denunciation.
On August 19, 1940, Dmitry pleaded guilty to illegal border crossing and anti-Soviet agitation. He continued to deny voluntary espionage, stating that he had refused Romanian recruitment attempts. The investigators ultimately agreed there was insufficient evidence to send the case to a military tribunal. Instead, on August 20, they recommended it be handled by the NKVD’s Special Board—an extrajudicial body that decided cases without a public trial.
On November 2, 1940, the Special Board sentenced Dmitry to eight years in a corrective labor camp (a Gulag) as a “socially dangerous element.” On November 26, an order was issued to transport him to Ivdellag, a corrective labor camp in the northern Urals, in the Sverdlovsk region. Ivdellag was not a single camp but a vast network of forest camps scattered through remote taiga (subarctic forest region), created to extract timber and build infrastructure in an isolated, inhospitable environment.
Dmitry would have suffered a long transport by rail and convoy under guard in a weakened state from months of interrogation and imprisonment. At Ivdellag, he would have encountered heavy physical labor, especially logging, road building, and related forest work. Workdays were long, commonly extending ten to fourteen hours, and continued through extreme winter cold. The region was known for severe temperatures, deep snow, and isolation that made escape nearly impossible.
Living conditions in the camp system were harsh. Prisoners were housed in overcrowded wooden barracks with poor insulation, inadequate heating, and chronic infestations of lice. Clothing and footwear were often insufficient for the climate. Food rations were directly tied to labor output, meaning that those who were sick, older, or physically weaker received less food, which in turn made it harder to meet work norms. When Dmitry arrived at Ivdellag, he was already sixty years old.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Discipline in Ivdellag relied on strict enforcement of rules and frequent punishment. Infractions—real or alleged—could lead to beatings, confinement in punishment cells, reduced rations, or extensions of sentence. Political prisoners like Dmitry, labeled “socially dangerous elements,” were particularly vulnerable within the camp hierarchy, often placed at the bottom and subject to abuse by guards or criminal inmates.
What happened to Dmitry after his transfer to Ivdellag is unknown. The archival file contains no information about his release, death, or survival. This absence of records is itself typical of the Gulag system, where files were lost, destroyed, or never completed, and where many men and women simply disappeared.
Decades later, in 1989, during the period of Gorbachev’s reforms, Dmitry’s case was reviewed. A military prosecutor determined that the charges against him were groundless and that his actions constituted no crime. On December 30, 1989, Dmitry Anisimovich Melnik was posthumously rehabilitated. A certificate was issued to his grandson, Feodosiy Ivanovich Krivitsky. The document stated plainly that there was no information in the file regarding Dmitry’s ultimate fate or death while in the Gulag.
Dmitry’s story is not one of rebellion or ideology, but of an ordinary man trying to provide for his family during the communist regime. He joined the kolkhoz when required, spoke honestly about hunger and fear, crossed a border to survive, and worked whenever and however he could. His story is not uncommon. When Dmitry was officially rehabilitated in 1989, the state acknowledged that it had wronged him. Yet, rehabilitation could not return his freedom, his years, or his life.
Repressed persons File for Dmitry Anisimovich Melnik found in the Khmelnitsky State Archives: ДАХMО/Р-6193/12/25042.
No comments:
Post a Comment