Kurenyovskaya tragedy

On December 2, 1952, the Kiev city executive committee decided to create a construction waste dump at Babi Yar, signed by the city executive committee chairman Alexei Davydov (who later committed suicide, according to official figures, who died of a heart attack).

On March 13, 1961, in the area of Kurenyovka , a dam was broken through which blocked the Babiy Yar , where the production waste ( pulp ) of nearby brick factories was dumped for 10 years. The dam began to collapse in the early morning at 6:45, and at 8:30 it burst. A mud shaft about 20 meters wide and 14 meters high rushed down, on the one hand, along the present-day Teligi street , resting on the tram depot, and on the other side - from the cliff down, past the Kirillovsky monastery , completely flooding Spartak stadium and part of Kirillovskaya streets (at that time - Frunze street). The mud flow was of such strength that it demolished buildings, cars, 10-ton trams in its path, not to mention people. The flood lasted only an hour and a half, but its consequences were disastrous.

The height of the shaft in the area of Kirillovskaya street was halved, but even that was enough to kill hundreds of people. Spilled pulp became hard as a rock. The total volume of descended pulp in the area of ​​Kirillovskaya - Konstantinovskaya streets was up to 600 thousand m³, with a thickness of up to 4 meters ^[1] .

As a result of the tragedy, the Spartak stadium was flooded with a layer of liquid mud with clay so that its high fence was not visible. The pulp almost completely destroyed the tram park . The situation was aggravated by the fact that the command to turn off the power supply was not transferred in time, and therefore there were a significant number of people killed in the tram park due to electric shock ^[2] .

On the initiative of the head of the technical department of Kazimir Bramsky ^[3] and director of the Kyiv Electric Transport Museum, in memory of the tram depot workers who died as a result of the Kurenyovsk tragedy in 1995, a memorial sign was opened a chapel was built on the enterprise’s territory and a collection of data on the dead was organized, the results of which were used to compile a complete list of the dead electricians ^[2] .

According to the official report with a note “for official use”, as a result of the accident, 68 residential and 13 administrative buildings were destroyed. 298 apartments and 163 private houses with 353 families of 1,228 people ^[4] were unfit for habitation. Data on the dead and wounded in the report is not. It was later named the number of 150 dead. Now the exact number of victims of the disaster is almost impossible to establish; According to estimates by the Kiev historian Alexander Anisimov, this is about 1.5 thousand people.

The authorities decided not to publicize the scale of the tragedy. On that day, long-distance and international communications were disconnected in Kiev. The official announcement of the disaster was broadcast on radio only on March 16 ^[5] .

Information about the Kureniv events was subject to severe censorship, many of the dead were buried in various cemeteries in Kiev and beyond, indicating in the documents and in the inscriptions on the graves different dates and causes of death. To eliminate the consequences of the disaster threw the troops. The soldiers worked day and night. First, they dug by hand with shovels, soon drove the equipment. Excavator buckets and bulldozer knives tore the bodies of the dead into pieces. Sometimes, according to eyewitness accounts, death-crying was heard alive from buried, but still living people. The soldiers, who had not been changed for two days for reasons of secrecy, took out human remains, torn by a mudslide. Despite the secrecy, thousands of people from Kiev came to the territory of the Pavlovsk psychiatric hospital, where in the club room they put rows of the dead. ^[6]

In the regime of secrecy, the procuracy of the Ukrainian SSR initiated a criminal case and conducted an investigation. A closed court sentenced six officials to imprisonment. According to the expert committee, the cause of the accident is called “errors in the design of hydraulic dumps and dams”.

Testifies M. N. Novgorod, teacher:

I got on the bus, the cabin of which was so crowded that I was literally sealed to the back door. Having passed a little, the bus was stuck in front of the Spartak stadium. Water began to reach the windows of the car. The drivers of all the stuck cars got out of them and floated to the opposite side to the fence of the stadium. There was a terrible scream on the bus. People realized that they were buried alive. And suddenly everything went dark. We went to the shaft - a solid foam mass of some gray color. The shaft was higher than the houses and covered the sky. The man in front of me jerked open the doors for a moment and stepped forward. I follow him. The stream knocked me down, but miraculously remained on the surface and floundering, I got to the fence of the stadium. When I climbed on it, there was an explosion - the bus, from which I got out a few moments ago, was engulfed in flames. Someone knocked out the front door, but only a woman and two girls were saved. Their hair was badly burned. The remaining passengers were burned alive ^[6] .

• Kurenivska tragedy 13 birch 1961 r. in Kiev: cause furniture, nasledki. Documents and Materials / Ed. Col .: V.A. Smoliy (head), G.V. Boryak, V.M. Danilenko (zast. goal), S.A. Kokin and ін .. - K .: Institute of History of Ukraine, 2012. - 548 s. - ISBN 978-966-02-6392-5 . (in Ukrainian)
• Bramsky K.A. Kurenyovskaya tragedy K: 2011 - 26 p., 10 ill., 1 scheme (ukr.)

• Kurenev disaster in Kiev. Documents: TsGAVO of Ukraine, TsGAOO of Ukraine, the State Humanitarian Department of Ukraine named after G. S. Pshenichnogo, State Archives of Kyiv