Spassk Memorial, the prisoner-of-war cemetery outside Karaganda

The Spassk Memorial is a cemetery and history monument in the village of Spassk, Karaganda region, where prisoners of war and internees of the Second World War are buried together with repressed Soviet citizens. It sits beside the M-36 highway about 33 km in a straight line from Karaganda. It suits travellers who want to understand the camp history of central Kazakhstan rather than see landscapes.

Where Spassk is: a short hop from Karaganda

Spassk is a village in Abay district of Karaganda region, right by the international M-36 highway that runs from Yekaterinburg to Almaty. Karaganda is the obvious base. Astana is about 222 km away in a straight line, so a visit from the capital means a long day or an overnight in Karaganda.

The two Wikipedia articles disagree on the distance. The Russian one puts the old camp 30 km from Karaganda; the Kazakh one says 45 km south of the city. Our computed straight-line figure is about 33 km. The road distance will be longer than the straight line.

For a foreign visitor the table says one thing: this is a short trip out of Karaganda, not a destination on its own.

What happened here: Camp No. 99

Spassk was the site of Camp No. 99, the largest prisoner-of-war and internee camp in Soviet Kazakhstan. It was the first of four such camps set up in Karaganda region after the war began, created on 5 July 1941 on the base of a local branch of Karlag, the Karaganda labour camp system. That branch itself occupied the grounds of the former Spassk copper smelter.

Figures for how many people passed through vary: from 66,160 (or 66,746) up to 70,000 prisoners of war and internees. By the start of mass repatriation the camp had 24 sub-sites, including Spassk, Temirtau, Saran, Dubovka, Fyodorovka and several coal mines, built to hold up to 30,000 people.

Prisoners built much of Karaganda. Their work included mine No. 38 with its processing plant, mines No. 105 and 106, the Summer Theatre (since demolished, now the site of the Seifullin Kazakh Drama Theatre) and a trauma hospital that still operates as the regional centre of traumatology and orthopaedics.

Who is buried at the Spassk Memorial

The cemetery holds 5,152 prisoners of war and internees: Germans, Japanese, Romanians, Austrians, Poles, Italians, Finns, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians and others. It also holds Soviet prisoners of the Spassk branch of Karlag from before 1941, and after 1948 convicts of the Spassk branches of the Steppe, Lugovoy and Peschany camps.

The Kazakh Wikipedia adds that foreign soldiers were held in the Peschany camp at Spassk, and lists Moldovans and Lithuanians among later prisoners. This is a burial ground first and a monument second, and visitors are expected to treat it that way.

The national monuments, in the order they appeared

After the Soviet Union collapsed, foreign governments began placing memorials to their own citizens, and the site grew into a field of national monuments. Japan was the first. The timeline below helps if you are looking for a specific country’s marker.

The Kazakh Wikipedia also lists the Philippines among the countries with a memorial sign here, which the Russian article does not mention. It describes a monument shaped like a shanyrak, the crown of a yurt roof, raised by people of Karaganda for all victims of political repression who died on Kazakh soil. By mid-2013 work was under way to add the complex to the historical heritage register; we could not confirm whether that has been completed.

Planning a visit without a car or Russian

We could not confirm any public transport to Spassk, opening hours, entry rules or on-site facilities. Without a car, the realistic approach is to arrange a driver from Karaganda and agree a waiting time in advance.

Locals will know the place as Спасск (Spassk). Our sources do not say what languages the signage uses; we could not confirm whether there is English information on site. The memorials stand in the open, and we have no climate data for this point, so check the forecast before you go.

Fitting Spassk into a central Kazakhstan route

Spassk pairs naturally with Karaganda itself, where the prisoner-built trauma hospital still operates. Other places on this site are far away: Lake Balkhash is about 353 km in a straight line, and the granite hills of Ulytau about 470 km. Both make sense only as separate legs of a longer overland trip through the region.

Luglag and its Spassk division appear in our table of the Gulag in Kazakhstan.