The Evacuation of the Kirovohrad Prison: The Zinkovsky / Zinkovskyi Case
The evacuation of Soviet prisons at the beginning of the German–Soviet war (1941–1945) affected many prisons and detention facilities in the western regions of the USSR that were threatened with occupation. The rapid advance of German troops forced local authorities to carry out evacuations in haste and without proper preparation, further worsening the already dire situation of the prisoners. They were transported in various ways: in columns on foot, by rail, or by lorry.
In especially critical situations, when evacuation proved impossible, the authorities resorted to extreme measures: the mass execution of prisoners, especially those convicted of so-called “counter-revolutionary crimes.”
One characteristic example of this grim chapter in Soviet history was the evacuation of the Kirovohrad prison. At the beginning of the war, the prison in Kirovohrad held several thousand prisoners of different categories. Among them were local “enemies of the people,” ordinary criminal offenders, people convicted of minor everyday offences, as well as refugees from Western Ukraine and residents of Transcarpathia convicted of illegally crossing the border.
Among the inmates of the Kirovohrad prison during the height of the fighting in 1941 were also a significant number of Jews. One of them was a certain Shlema-Moshka Avrumovich Zinkovsky, or Zinkovskyi, whose archival investigation file can be found on our website.
According to the documents, on 2 July 1941, while standing among a group of workers near Buffet No. 147 on Karl Marx Street, Shlema-Moshka Zinkovsky, who worked as a bookbinder at the Kirovohrad Regional Library, publicly made slanderous statements about Joseph Stalin. Witnesses Solomon Fridman, an employee of the Sivashets cinema, and Yefim Konstantinovsky, a forwarding agent at Kirtorg, claimed that Zinkovsky shouted loudly in Yiddish: “Stalin is a fool and a madman, and he will blow hot milk into the Germans’ tuches.”
Seeing a sentry at the entrance, brought there by the buffet worker Milya Taradash, Zinkovsky tried to flee, but was immediately detained. Once in the Kirovohrad prison, Zinkovsky denied his guilt, but, incriminated by witness testimony, was charged under Article 54-10, Part 2 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR with anti-Soviet agitation. He never had time to stand trial.
By February 1942, only his investigation file had turned up in Aktobe, Kazakhstan; the Kirovohrad prisoner himself, evacuated eastward, seemed to have vanished without a trace. His brothers Samuil and Isaac, questioned as witnesses, also knew nothing about Zinkovsky’s whereabouts. In 1948, Shlema-Moshka Avrumovich Zinkovsky was placed on an all-Union wanted list, but despite all the efforts of the MGB, he was never found.
In July 1990, his archival criminal case was closed on the grounds that his actions contained no elements of a crime.
Did Shlema-Moshka Avrumovich Zinkovsky become a victim of extrajudicial executions, like many inmates of the Kirovohrad prison, or was he destined to survive? We invite readers to imagine their own version of this wartime tragedy.
Freddy Rotman
