#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. The specialists of the Taimyr Museum of Local Lore learned about the military engineer Vladimir Bering’s fate from the Political Repression Victims Memory Book. The direct descendant of the captain-commander of the Russian fleet, who also led the Great Northern Expedition, was brought to the Dudinka branch of the Norillag in 1935. The former chief designer of the artillery plant in Podlipki, now the city of Korolyov, was arrested in 1933, six months after being awarded the Order of the Red Star. In 1932, the design bureau headed by Bering initiated the mass production of new anti-tank guns. Before that, there had been developments in the field of both tank and anti-aircraft medium-caliber artillery.
According to the OGPU, Vladimir Bering allegedly led a sabotage group that planned to disrupt the production of the factory products.
In the Norilskstroy system, convict Bering began working in Dudinka in mechanical workshops. Two years later, the head of the workshops was again accused of sabotage activities in order to disrupt the construction of the Norilsk Combine and was shot.
Twenty years later, the decree was canceled, and Vladimir Bering was posthumously rehabilitated. Bering’s daughter Marina Vladimirovna, who in 1933 was only three years old, was engaged in the return of a good name to his father, in the search for his burial place. The Dudinka museum workers first met Marina Vladimirovna’s friends, who lived in Finland, and then began to correspond with her and even transferred a handful of Taimyr land to Finland in memory of Vladimir Bering.
In 2012, the old wooden bridge over the stream was restored in Dudinka. All the prisoners of the Norillag had walked along that Bridge of Memory, starting from the pier, in the 1930s – 1950s. The descendant of the great navigator was one of the first. After 65 years, the grandson of Vladimir Bering, Marat, passed through it. He came to the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Taimyr Museum and brought photocopies of his grandfather’s letters, old family photographs, a faded sheet of the OGPU search protocol dated 1933.
The last time a set of materials by Vitus Bering’s descendant was exhibited at the Norillag. Survive and Remember exhibition, which opened on October 30 this year.
Text: Valentina Vachaeva, Photo: Taimyr Museum of Local Lore and open sources
