Who will the ships come for? Prisoner of the Kolyma camps Valery Sinyakov

The article examines the fate of Valery Sinyakov, a prisoner of the Kolyma camps who was sentenced in 1941 to death under Article 58 of the RSFSR Criminal Code for “counter-revolutionary sabotage”. In the 1990s, Valery Sinyakov was rehabilitated and included in the Magadan book of memory “Ships will come for us ...”. According to available archival documents, in the mid-1930s V.A. Sinyakov was the leader of a criminal group, was twice convicted of theft and banditry, and was involved in murder and infliction of grievous bodily harm. According to the author of the article, the validity of his rehabilitation on the basis of his 1941 criminal record requires additional verification and examination. The circumstances of V.A. Sinyakov’s conviction and rehabilitation cannot, however, be examined in detail due to limited access to the relevant archival documents. The article concludes that the inaccessibility of huge arrays of documents for researchers negatively affects the coverage of the Soviet past, creates conditions for deliberate distortion of historical reality in favor of a variety of interests and concepts.