Catastrophes of Sakhalin. Killer wave. The party said yes. Certificate from the Deputy Chief of the Sakhalin Regional Police Department on the results of a trip to the disaster area

Autumn 1952 East Coast Kamchatka, the islands of Paramushir and Shumshu were on the first line of impact of the elements. The North Kuril tsunami of 1952 was one of the five largest in the history of the twentieth century.

Tsunami in Kamchatka, 1952

Tsunami in Kamchatka, 1952

The city of Severo-Kurilsk was destroyed. The Kuril and Kamchatka settlements of Utyosny, Levashovo, Reef, Rocky, Coastal, Galkino, Okeansky, Podgorny, Major Van, Shelekhovo, Savushkino, Kozyrevsky, Babushkino, Baikovo were swept away ...

In the autumn of 1952, the country lived an ordinary life. The Soviet press, Pravda and Izvestia, did not get a single line: neither about the tsunami in the Kuriles, nor about the thousands of dead people.

The picture of what happened can be restored from the memories of eyewitnesses, rare photographs.

Tsunami in Kamchatka, 1952

Writer Arkady Strugatsky, who served in those years in the Kuriles as a military translator, took part in the aftermath of the tsunami. He wrote to his brother in Leningrad:

“... I was on the island of Syumusyu (or Shumshu - look for it at the southern tip of Kamchatka). What I saw, did and experienced there - I can’t write yet. I can only say that I visited the area where the disaster I wrote to you about made itself felt especially strongly.

Tsunami in Kamchatka, 1952

The black island of Syumushu, the island of the wind of Syumusyu, the ocean beats into the rocks-walls of Syumushu. The one who was on Shumushu was on Shumushu that night, remembers how the ocean attacked Shumushu; As on the piers of Shumushu, and on the pillboxes of Shumushu, and on the roofs of Shumushu, the ocean collapsed with a roar; As in the dells of Shumushu, and in the trenches of Shumushu, the ocean raged in the bare hills of Shumushu. And in the morning, Syumusyu, to the walls-rocks of Syumusyu many corpses, Syumusyu, carried the Pacific Ocean. The black island of Shumushu, the island of fear of Shumushu. Who lives on Shumushu looks at the ocean.

I wove these verses under the impression of what I saw and heard. I don’t know how from a literary point of view, but from the point of view of facts, everything is correct ... "

War!

In those years, work on the registration of residents in Severo-Kurilsk was not properly established. Seasonal workers, secret military units, the composition of which was not disclosed. According to the official report, in 1952 about 6,000 people lived in Severo-Kurilsk.

82-year-old South Sakhalin resident Konstantin Ponedelnikov went with his comrades to the Kuriles in 1951 to earn extra money. They built houses, plastered walls, helped to install reinforced concrete salting vats at the fish processing plant. In those years, there were many visitors to the Far East: they arrived on recruitment, worked out the period established by the contract.

Tsunami in Kamchatka, 1952

Konstantin Ponedelnikov says:
- It all happened on the night of November 4-5. I was still a bachelor, well, it’s a young thing, I came from the street late, already at two or three. Then he lived in an apartment, rented a room from a family fellow countryman, also from Kuibyshev. Just went to bed - what is it? The house shook. The owner shouts: get up quickly, get dressed - and go outside. He had lived there for several years, he knew what was what.

Konstantin ran out of the house, lit a cigarette. The ground shook palpably underfoot. And suddenly from the side of the shore they heard shooting, screams, noise. In the light of the ship's searchlights, people fled from the bay. "War!" they shouted. So, at least, it seemed to the guy at first. Later I realized: the wave! Water!!! Self-propelled guns went from the sea towards the hills, where the frontier post was stationed. And together with everyone, Konstantin ran after him, upstairs.

From the report of senior lieutenant of state security P. Deryabin:
“... We didn’t have time to reach the regional department, when we heard a great noise, then crackling from the sea. Looking around, we saw a high water shaft advancing from the sea to the island ... I gave the order to open fire from personal weapons and shout: “Water is coming!”, At the same time retreating to the hills. Hearing the noise and screams, people began to run out of the apartments in what they were dressed (most in underwear, barefoot) and run into the hills.”

Konstantin Ponedelnikov:
- Our path to the hills lay through a ditch three meters wide, where wooden walkways were laid for the transition. Next to me, panting, ran a woman with a five-year-old boy. I grabbed the child in an armful - and together with him jumped over the ditch, where only the strength came from. And the mother has already moved over the boards.

Army dugouts were located on the hill, where the exercises took place. It was there that people settled down to warm themselves - it was November. These dugouts became their refuge for the next few days.

On the site of the former Severo-Kurilsk. June 1953

three waves

After the first wave left, many went down to find the missing relatives, to release the cattle from the barns. People did not know: tsunamis have a long wavelength, and sometimes tens of minutes pass between the first and second.

From the report of P. Deryabin:
“... Approximately 15–20 minutes after the departure of the first wave, a wave of water again gushed even greater strength and magnitude than the first. People, thinking that everything was already over (many, heartbroken by the loss of their loved ones, children and property), descended from the hills and began to settle in the surviving houses to keep warm and dress themselves. Water, not meeting resistance on its way ... rushed onto land, completely destroying the remaining houses and buildings. This wave destroyed the entire city and killed most of the population.

And almost immediately the third wave swept into the sea almost everything that it could take with it. The strait separating the islands of Paramushir and Shumshu was filled with floating houses, roofs and debris.

The tsunami, which was later named after the destroyed city - "tsunami in Severo-Kurilsk" - was caused by an earthquake in pacific ocean, 130 km from the coast of Kamchatka. An hour after a powerful (magnitude about 9 points) earthquake, the first tsunami wave reached Severo-Kurilsk. The height of the second, the most terrible, wave reached 18 meters. According to official figures, 2,336 people died in Severo-Kurilsk alone.

Konstantin Ponedelnikov did not see the waves themselves. At first he delivered refugees to the hill, then with several volunteers they went down and saved people for many hours, pulling them out of the water, taking them off the roofs. The real scale of the tragedy became clear later.

- He went down to the city ... We had a watchmaker there, a good guy, legless. I look: his stroller. And he himself lies there, dead. The soldiers pile the corpses on a britzka and take them to the hills, where they either go to a mass grave, or how else they buried them - God knows. And along the coast there were barracks, a sapper military unit. One foreman escaped, he was at home, and the whole company perished. A wave covered them. There was a bullpen, and there were probably people there. Maternity home, hospital... Everyone died.

From a letter from Arkady Strugatsky to his brother:

“The buildings were destroyed, the entire coast was littered with logs, fragments of plywood, pieces of hedges, gates and doors. There were two old naval artillery towers on the pier, they were placed by the Japanese almost at the end of the Russo-Japanese War. The tsunami threw them a hundred meters away. When dawn broke, those who managed to escape descended from the mountains - men and women in linen, trembling with cold and horror. Most of the inhabitants either sank or lay on the shore interspersed with logs and debris.

The evacuation of the population was carried out promptly. After a short call from Stalin to the Sakhalin Regional Committee, all nearby aircraft and watercraft were sent to the disaster area.

Konstantin, among about three hundred victims, ended up on the Amderma steamer, completely crammed with fish. For people, they unloaded half of the coal hold, threw a tarpaulin.

Through Korsakov they brought them to Primorye, where they lived for some time in very difficult conditions. But then “at the top” they decided that recruitment contracts needed to be worked out, and they sent everyone back to Sakhalin. There was no question of any material compensation, it’s good if you could at least confirm the experience. Konstantin was lucky: his work boss survived and restored work books and passports...

fish place

Many destroyed villages were never rebuilt. The population of the islands has been greatly reduced. The port city of Severo-Kurilsk was rebuilt in a new place, higher up. Without carrying out the same volcanological examination, so that as a result the city ended up in an even more dangerous place - on the path of the mud flows of the Ebeko volcano, one of the most active in the Kuriles.

The life of the port of Severo-Kurilsk has always been connected with fish. The work is profitable, people came, lived, left - there was some kind of movement. In the 1970s and 80s, only loafers at sea did not earn 1,500 rubles a month (an order of magnitude more than in similar work on the mainland). In the 1990s, crab was caught and taken to Japan. But in the late 2000s, the Federal Agency for Fishery had to almost completely ban the fishing of king crab. To not disappear at all.

Today, compared to the late 1950s, the population has halved. Today, about 2,500 people live in Severo-Kurilsk - or, as the locals say, in Sevkur. Of these, 500 are under the age of 18. In the maternity ward of the hospital, 30-40 citizens of the country are born annually, whose place of birth is Severo-Kurilsk.

The fish processing factory provides the country with stocks of navaga, flounder and pollock. Approximately half of the workers are local. The rest are visitors ("verbota", recruited). They earn about 25 thousand a month.

Selling fish to fellow countrymen is not accepted here. Its a whole sea, and if you want cod or, say, halibut, you need to come to the port in the evening, where the fishing ships are unloaded, and simply ask: “Listen, brother, wrap the fish.”

Tourists in Paramushir are still only a dream. Visitors are accommodated in the "Fisherman's House" - a place that is only partly heated. True, a thermal power plant was recently modernized in Sevkur, and a new pier was built in the port.

One problem is the inaccessibility of Paramushir. More than a thousand kilometers to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, three hundred to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. The helicopter flies once a week, and then on condition that the weather will be in Petrik, and in Severo-Kurilsk, and at Cape Lopatka, which ends Kamchatka. Well, if you wait a couple of days. Maybe three weeks...

The tsunami of 1952 destroyed the entire Severo-Kurilsk, but for a long time nothing could be known about this.

MONSTERIOUS ECHO FROM THE DEEP OCEAN

Every year on November 5, Severo-Kurilsk commemorates those who died in terrible disaster 1952. Then the tsunami washed away the entire district center. As it was calculated later, the unbridled elements claimed the lives of 2336 local residents. Someone was simply washed away into the sea, and the fact of death was established only when reconciling the lists of the population. By all standards, it was an extraordinary tsunami, says Viktor Kaystrenko, a leading researcher at the Tsunami Laboratory of the Institute of Marine Geology and Geophysics (IMGiG), Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. The elements, like a giant skating rink, swept through the Northern Kuriles and southern Kamchatka, practically destroying Severo-Kurilsk and other coastal settlements in this territory. The tsunami of 1952 was transoceanic, and waves of unprecedented magnitude reached all the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

The giant wave that washed Severo-Kurilsk off the face of the earth was caused by a strong earthquake. It, in turn, occurred in the ocean, and its magnitude exceeded 9 points. Over the past 200 years, according to the data available to scientists, there have been only 10 such earthquakes with a focus in the ocean. Nine of them were registered on the periphery of the Pacific Ocean, which is not surprising: the most tectonically active zone of the planet, the so-called Pacific ring, is located here ... The recent terrible tsunami in the Indian Ocean, which hit the coasts of Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and other countries at the end of 2004.

However, for a long time information about the tragedy of November 5, 1952 was hidden under the headings "Secret" or "For Official Use". That was the time then. Shel Last year Stalin's life.

These data began to be declassified only in the 90s. At the same time, for the first time, they started talking about the construction of a memorial to those who died in the regional center. The most detailed description, in hot pursuit, is contained in the report of the Hydrographic Expedition of the Pacific Fleet, based in Kamchatka. Three of her ships were in the Northern Kuriles the very next day. Volcanologist A. Svyatlovsky landed on the islands with them. A week later, scientists arrived there from Sakhalin, from the Integrated Research Institute (as IMGiG was then called). In the 1990s, already well-known professor A. Svyatlovsky handed over his archives to V. Kaistrenko. These data, emphasizes V. Kaistrenko, are very valuable for studying that tsunami.

Information about the North Kuril tsunami of 1952 was partially published in open scientific publications only in 1957–1959. The vultures on most documents did not allow writing about the tsunami in more detail and conducting large-scale studies. It is these documents that now form the basis of future scientific research, and are also a good reminder of what inattention to the seismic features of Sakhalin and the Kuriles can turn into.

FROM THE PUSH TO THE FIRST WAVE

So, this is the picture that emerges from archival documents.

The night was moonlit. The destructive wave was preceded by an earthquake. It happened at night around 5 am Kamchatka time. People got used to constant tremors, but these were stronger than usual and were accompanied by an underground rumble. Residents jumped out of their houses, but the earthquake seemed to have subsided. Moreover, there were no more severe destructions. The anxiety subsided, but, as it turned out, not for long ...

The first wave came in about 20 minutes ... Its height was 5-8 meters. As it turned out later, not everyone knew what a tsunami was and how it was related to an earthquake.

The first blow fell on the ships standing in the port ladle. The moon well illuminated the scene of the tragedy. The tsunami just overwhelmed them. Some, being thrown into the sea, were able to stay afloat and did not drown. According to Lev Dombrovsky, the captain of one of them said that he had not believed in this before: their tank landing ship was torn off the anchor and mooring lines like a feather, literally spun and thrown into the bay, but the ship did not receive any damage and then participated in saving people.

From the memoirs of an eyewitness, Captain Nikolai Mikhalchenko:

- When the first shocks stopped, my wife and I returned to the house. We lived 30-40 meters from the shore in the Okeansky village on Paramushir. After a while it began to shake again, we began to dress and then I heard shouts: “Water!”. I opened the door and I was literally carried away by a powerful stream. The house folded like cardboard, but I managed to catch on to its roof before it was blown off ... It's dark, I can't see anything. I flew off along with the roof, felt a solid surface under my feet, came to my senses and ran to the hill in the direction of the fish factory. Later I already noticed that the roof of my house was thrown back from the shore for about half a kilometer. We stayed on the hill for two or three days, until ships arrived from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and began to take those who survived to Severo-Kurilsk. In Okeansky, everyone who lived near the shore died.

SILENT MORNING

The second wave was much higher and more destructive. There was no electricity in the houses - the previous onslaught did not touch the power plant ... After the second blow, the entire lower part of the regional center was washed away. Actually, almost the entire settlement was located there.

From the memoirs of Lev Dombrovsky:

- The second wave came 40 minutes after the first. Looking through the binoculars, I could not believe my eyes: the city was simply gone… And the morning was quiet and sunny. The ocean was calm. And in the sea near the shore one could see empty containers, barrels for fuel, we even made out a wooden house. It just washed away...

We were all on edge... Dead bodies were scattered all over the ground... One man was hanging from a crane mast. Undestroyed was one house made of slabs. But only its foundation survived, and the roof, doors and windows were torn out.

Snow fell a few days after the tragedy. As it turned out later, of the buildings, only two objects made of concrete remained completely unharmed: the gates of the stadium and the monument to the Hero Soviet Union Stepan Savushkin.

Cases of looting were recorded, they were stopped only with the help of the military. The victims were taken to Vladivostok, Kamchatka and Sakhalin. The shock was the strongest, but after a while the North Kurilians began to return to their islands.

RESCUE OF THE DROWNING

The archives have preserved truly amazing stories of rescuing people thrown into the open sea. V. Kaistrenko met personally with the eyewitness of one of them, the captain of the fishing vessel Alexei Mezis.

According to the captain's memoirs, his crew picked up a woman who had been drifting in the sea for three whole days on the roof of a demolished house. She clung to it literally death grip. tidal current it was carried several times along the strait from the Sea of ​​Okhotsk to the ocean and back. Even after several days, the northern Kuril woman did not immediately understand what had happened to her - such was the blow to her psyche ... But it was November ...

Fate also favored Mesis himself - that day his ship was in Severo-Kurilsk, and he went to see his family in Kozyrevsk, on neighboring Shumshu, which was separated from Severo-Kurilsk 3 miles across the strait. Mezis saw the whole picture of the arrival of the tsunami from the other side and managed to climb the hills. And in Kozyrevsk, the wave, like a bulldozer, crushed the local fish factory.

No less amazing is the story of the boy - from Severo-Kurilsk he was carried by a wave at the gate. They brought him to the village of Babushkino on the island of Shumshu. The shock was strong, the child did not understand what had happened and where he was. He did not thaw immediately. And he did not remain an orphan - his parents found him.

UNTIL THE WAVE BREAKS...

The 1952 tsunami showed how unprepared local authorities and local population live next to such a formidable phenomenon as a tsunami. No one thought that buildings in the coastal strip are subject to the impact of a giant wave. They were built on the principle of economic expediency, without regard for safety. Ordinary residents did not pay much attention to the fact that near the Japanese houses, the former owners built stairs to the hills - in order to climb up at the first danger and protect themselves from the crushing killer wave. Yes, no one explained to them how to behave during such elements. The rescue of the drowning turned out to be, in fact, the work of the drowning themselves.

However, after the tsunami of 1952, the Tsunami Warning System began to be created in the USSR, and 1955 is considered the year of its birth.

In 1964, a decision was made by the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR to ban construction in tsunami-prone areas. But in addition to this decision, no regulatory framework was created. Therefore, new objects continued to appear in the zones within reach of the tsunami. This once again played a cruel joke on the Northern Kuriles in 1960.

With the collapse of the Union, the observation system began to collapse, and the tsunami warning system remained technically outdated. It began to revive with the beginning of this century, and this cannot but rejoice, emphasizes V. Kaistrenko. Three research institutes of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, specialists from the Sakhalin Hydrometeorological Service, the Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Nizhny Novgorod Technical University are now involved in tsunami research. In the regional department of construction, two years ago, work began on the regulatory framework for design and construction in tsunami-prone areas. And the tragedy of 1952 should be a reminder for all of us - we are powerless in the face of the violence of nature, but it is in our power to protect ourselves from it in order to prevent the death of people and reduce destruction to a minimum.

A tsunami comparable to the tsunami of 1952 occurred in December 2004 off the coast of Indonesia, when more than two hundred thousand of its inhabitants died, many vacationers in the resorts of Thailand, tens and hundreds of residents of settlements on the coast of other countries in the Indian Ocean zone. Unusual experience about. Simelu, located closest to the source of this tsunami, with more than 76 thousand people. 7 people died there, because people knew how to live next to the tsunami and escape from the wave. And on other coasts - terrible losses.

REFERENCE. TSUNAMI ON SAKHALIN

Historically, few of these phenomena have been recorded on the island. Prior to the installation of special instruments, 3 tsunami cases can be noted.

1878- the navigator reported in the newspapers that their ship was lost due to a high wave. Subsequently, there was an assumption that the wave was caused by an earthquake.

1924– there is a single report that in one of the reservoirs the water level changed.

1940 The epicenter of this tsunami was in the Sea of ​​Japan. The earthquake was almost not felt, but the waves covered the shore. Their maximum height was approximately 4 meters. Although the damage was significant, there were no human casualties.

Analyzing the state of active areas of the earth's interior, scientists mark the epicenters of earthquakes on them and study the frequency of their presence in certain places. It turns out that epicenters usually create special areas in which tremors often occur.

In the location area of ​​Sakhalin Island, a similar area is located on great depth, which explains the rare and rather weak tsunamis. Even very powerful shocks at a depth of more than three hundred kilometers are unlikely to lead to the appearance of powerful tsunamis, and they have not been observed. In the near future, such powerful changes in the earth's interior near Sakhalin are not expected, therefore, there will be no high waves either.

However, such a phenomenon as moving epicenters does occur in the bowels of Sakhalin. Epicenters can change the depth of occurrence, which is quite dangerous and can lead to a tsunami. Similar cases have already been recorded, but their consequences were quite safe.

To the 65th anniversary of the tragedy

What a terrible, menacing noise came from the sea,

How unstable the earth suddenly became,

When two huge ridges of grief rolled,

And the cry of people beat, praying for salvation.

The inscription on the memorial

in memory of the victims of the tsunami1952. in Severo-Kurilsk

... Incomprehensible elemental strength

She put the schooners on the priest.

Crazed crowd.

And then, moving away, with a run

The waves crashed to the shore.

Having occupied the slope of Ebeko,

People looked down in fear...

Yuri Druzhinin. "Tsunami. Severo-Kurilsk»

On November 5, 1952, the inhabitants of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky were awakened by strong tremors. It was two minutes to 4 am local time.

The walls of houses swayed and cracked, plaster fell, cabinet doors opened and things and books fell on the floor. The lights flickered and then went out. Frightened, undressed people grabbed children in the dark and left their homes in a panic. And the ground continued to move from under my feet.

The earthquake lasted for more than five minutes. Then the shocks began to weaken and gradually ceased. The houses survived. The light came on...

And at this time in the Pacific Ocean, 200 kilometers southeast of Petropavlovsk, a sea wave reared up from the tremors above the epicenter of the earthquake. Accelerating her run and strength, rising higher and higher, she rushed to the shores of Kamchatka and the Kuril Islands. After 40 minutes of running, it grew to eight meters and overwhelmed the land. The lowlands and estuarine parts of the river valleys were flooded. Having torn off the earth from the rocks along with trees and shrubs, the wave rolled back, carrying rich prey into the ocean. She licked up outfits of border guards walking along the edge of the coast, watchtowers, boats, boats and kungas, wooden buildings, several small villages in Kamchatka and the Kuriles, and the whole city of Severo-Kurilsk on Paramushir Island.

The first wave was followed by the second. Then the third...

Horror fettered the people who found themselves in the face of a ferocious element. There was no land anywhere, there was no sky ... Only water. And there was no strength left ...

It was a terrible night of an enraged ocean that devoured thousands of human lives ...

Leafing through newspaper files for 1952. November. The Country of Soviets is preparing to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Cheerful reports of cities, enterprises, regions sound. Appeals are printed with which the working people are to come out to festive events. The Ministers of Defense and the Navy prepared congratulations and orders for the personnel. Finally, on November 6, a solemn meeting took place in Moscow, at which Comrade Stalin was present. November 7 - traditional parade, demonstrations of workers.

The newspaper "Pravda" - not a single hint of the tragedy in the Far East. Neither on November 6, nor on November 7, nor in the following days and even months ...

The newspaper "Izvestia" - the same ...

"Kamchatskaya Pravda" is also silent. And in order not to seem sly in front of their readers, most of whom know everything, November 8, 9, and 10 are not published at all - a day off. Finally, on November 11, he announces: "The Soviet people celebrated the 35th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution with great enthusiasm and enthusiasm."

It becomes clear that the earthquake and tsunami are ordered to be forgotten. Although at this time in Tarya Bay, on the other side of the Avacha Bay, directly opposite Petropavlovsk, dozens and dozens of victims, picked up from all over Kamchatka, are still buried. Hundreds of the wounded, brought by steamers from the coast, are in hospitals. The people of Petropavlovsk are still fearful of a possible recurrence of the elements and are afraid to spend the night in their houses. They still cry and remember. But already ordered to forget.

The country never knew. Moreover, the world did not know. For many years there were all sorts of conversations, rumors, speculation. But what was the reality?

And the documents that captured those events were securely lying in dark vaults, closed with a double lock: "Top Secret."

Nowadays, when any natural or man-made disaster instantly, with some frenzied haste, splashes out on TV screens, on the front pages of newspapers, the silence of 1952 can seem almost malicious. But we must not forget: this was the style of an entire era, without distinction of borders and ideologies. Tough style of the times cold war. The trouble, especially of such dimensions, was immediately put on the rank of a military secret.

The night duty officer of the Kamchatka Regional Committee of the CPSU, Comrade Kosov, experienced a strong fright during the earthquake. In the second minute of the tremors, the lights went out. The phone went silent. The wooden building of the regional committee swayed.

When the shocks stopped, Kosov, following the instructions, tried to call the party secretaries, but the phone remained silent. Light, however, was soon given. Then Kosov quickly ran around the offices to see their condition.

In many offices, plaster was crumbling from the ceilings, folders with cases fell out of cabinets lay on the floor. The vents were opened. The wall clock hung at random, and many stopped. As it turned out later, cracks up to two centimeters wide gaped in the walls.

As it turned out, there was no connection only because telephone operators, like other Petropavlovsk residents, left their jobs in a panic during the earthquake. When the shaking of the earth's interior, and with it the shaking of the legs, caused by a strong fright, stopped, people returned. The connection worked. Calls began ringing in the reception area.

They called from the shipyard. It was reported that the plumbing was damaged and the water supply had to be turned off. Equipment shifting was observed in the workshops. The shipyard administration decided to stop the night shift, and the workers were organized into teams to eliminate accidents.

The berths in the seaport slightly shifted and cracked. Partial destruction and displacement of berths were also observed in the fishing port. In some of them, bulges and cracks up to 8 centimeters wide were formed. In the first minutes of the earthquake, water spilled over the piers. Moored boats and kungas were torn off by strong excitement. Several stacks of cargo fell apart. Water pipes broke in four places.

There were also reports that stoves and pipes were destroyed in some residential buildings of the city, glass flew out of the windows. By the way, ichthyologist Innokenty Aleksandrovich Polutov describes this earthquake in this way: “Our service shepherd dog Hindu, who usually slept under a table in a city house, woke me up all night under the tsunami, and I, not knowing the reasons, took her outside, and so on until dawn The earthquake started at about four o'clock in the morning."

While the officer on duty received by phone and wrote down the incoming information, secretaries and employees gathered in the regional committee. The same thing happened in the regional executive committee, in institutions and enterprises. Petropavlovsk could no longer sleep. Yes, and low-power shocks now and then resumed, frightening people.

The head of the regional communications department, Poshekhonov, sent an urgent telegram to the village of Klyuchi, in central part peninsula Kamchatka, where the volcanological station was located. At the request of the leaders of the Kamchatka region - the first secretary of the regional committee P.N. Solovyov and the chairman of the regional executive committee A.F. Spasyonykh, he asked volcanologists about the forecast of the further development of the earthquake. At the Petropavlovsk seismic station, they could not say anything about this, since their seismographs, designed to record a maximum of an eight-point earthquake, went off scale from the first night shocks, and scientists not only could not give at least some short-term forecast, but did not know the characteristics of the elements either. . "More than eight points" - so approximately they estimated the power of the earthquake. No one knew that it was not recorded at all in Klyuchi, since the seismographs had previously been removed for preventive repairs. Thus, the earthquake of November 5, 1952 remained with an approximate characteristic - "more than 8 points". Later, a group of scientists led by Professor E.F. Savarinsky tried to summarize all the available information. They came to the conclusion that in terms of the amount of energy released, the earthquake many times exceeded the Ashgabat earthquake of 1948. The nature of soil vibrations in various parts of Kamchatka and the Northern Kuriles made it possible to state that the earthquake source was located at a depth not exceeding 20-30 km. (?) The exceptionally high intensity of the earthquake and the tsunamis generated by it testified to significant disturbances in the topography of the ocean floor in the epicentral zone. The closest point to the epicenter of the coast of Kamchatka is Cape Shipunsky, the distance to it is 140 km. The distance to Petropavlovsk-on-Kamchatka is 200 km, and to Severo-Kurilsk - about 350 km. Only due to the remoteness of the epicenter from the coast and the shallow depth of the focus, the earthquake was not accompanied by more significant damage.

At 5:20 am, the officer on duty at the Kamchatka Regional Committee of the CPSU received a message that a big trouble had happened in the village of Khalaktyrka, which was located on the ocean, twenty kilometers from Petropavlovsk. It was reported that the village was flooded, there were destruction and casualties.

On the instructions of the first secretary, the duty officer called the head of the MGB department for the Kamchatka region, A.E. Chernoshtan, to the regional committee to check this information.

By this time, all the first leaders of the region and large enterprises had already gathered in the regional committee. It was decided to create a headquarters of members of the bureau of the regional party committee to coordinate emergency work. Subsequently, the headquarters was renamed into the regional commission. It was chaired by the first secretary of the regional committee P.N. Soloviev. The commission included the chairman of the regional executive committee A.F. Spasyonykh, the 2nd secretary of the regional party committee V.I. Alekseev, the head of the MGB department for the Kamchatka region A.E. Chernoshtan, the head of the Glavkamchatrybprom A.T. Sidorenko.

The first thing the commission did was to give instructions to put all means of rescue at the enterprises and military units of the region on constant readiness. Then, on the radio, she addressed the population of Petropavlovsk with a call for calm. In addition, it was recommended that people inspect the stoves before lighting them.

After that, Spasyonykh and Alekseev immediately went to passenger car in Khalaktyrka.

About three dozen families lived in this small, ancient Kamchadal village, located on the ocean. Almost all adults worked in the fishing artel. It was led by Mikhail Trofimovich Skomorokhov.

During the night, the residents of the village were also awakened by an earthquake. Having run out of the houses, they soon made sure that nothing terrible had happened - there was no destruction, people were alive. But they were in no hurry to return to their warm homes. And they did the right thing - soon a strong noise was heard from the ocean. The indigenous people of Kamchatka, they immediately understood what was coming a big wave.

Skomorokhov gave the command to run to the hill overlooking the village. Having let the cattle out of the sheds, grabbed the children and the most valuable belongings, the villagers ran to the hill. Behind them, a wave rolled onto the shore with a roar.

She did not have time to catch up with people, but the village brought great destruction. She completely washed away the smoking, caviar and pickling sheds, destroyed four houses, and severely damaged six more. In addition, the water in the Khalaktyrka River rose, demolished wooden bridge, and the inhabitants of the village were sandwiched between the river and the ocean. The panic began. Fortunately, the height of the subsequent tsunami waves decreased, but the fear in the people remained.

Two or three hours later, cars appeared on the other side of the river. It was the secretary of the regional party committee Alekseev, the chairman of the regional executive committee of the Saved, and after them - the border guards. They shouted to the inhabitants of Khalaktyrka that they would immediately begin building a pontoon bridge and save everyone. This somewhat reassured people.

Soon the sappers arrived, and the construction of the pontoon bridge began. When the work was almost completed, the water in the river began to decrease sharply. The ocean waves have also subsided.

The state security operative junior lieutenant Ivan Efremov and policeman Ivan Gromov copied the people and checked them against the list of the village council. One family was missing, consisting of a husband, wife and four-year-old child. Soon they were found dead, drowning in the water. They were the first victims that they learned about in Petropavlovsk. But almost immediately the news came that at the southernmost tip of Kamchatka - Cape Lopatka, two border detachments of four people were washed into the sea. Couldn't find anyone.

And at the entrance to Avacha Bay, several sailors and officers were washed away. True, they survived, grabbing onto the floating debris of coastal buildings. Military boats quickly managed to pick up everyone.

In Petropavlovsk, in these early hours of November 5, they did not yet know about the terrible tragedies that broke out in the villages of the eastern coast of Kamchatka, as well as on the Paramushir and Shumshu islands of the North Kuril archipelago.

One of the northernmost points of the eastern coast of Kamchatka, where the tsunami waves reached, was Olga Bay in the Kronotsky Bay. Here, between the mouths of the rivers Olga and Tatyana, there was the village of Kronoki, on the outskirts of which, near the ocean, there was a coastal facility of the Bogachev geological exploration expedition.

Shortly before the earthquake, the ship "Saltykov-Shchedrin" came to the geologists. Food, drilling equipment, three new STZ-NATI tractors, various technical and building materials, overalls, timber for the construction of standard houses, more than two thousand barrels of fuel were taken ashore from it. Ten kungas, three S-80 tractors and two ZIS-151 trucks worked on unloading. The head of the expedition, Vladimir Alexandrovich Pervago, personally supervised the unloading.

They went to bed very late. And at 4 o'clock in the morning, construction timber and barrels scattered from stacks rumbled. Frightened people jumped out of houses and tents, ran along the shore with lanterns, checking the cargo. When they more or less calmed down, the first tsunami wave hit ...

The head of the expedition Pervago at that time was inside the food warehouse. The impact of the wave on the plank walls made him and the worker who ran in there with him jump out. They were immediately picked up by the fast current of water leaving the sea and carried into the darkness. The worker, choking, kept grabbing Pervago by the hands, but soon he himself clung either to a tractor standing on the shore, or to a pile of drill pipes, after which he managed to catch the boss as well, so their rapid movement into the roaring ocean stopped. Salt water washed over them both, rolling over their heads, tearing their arms and legs, but they managed to hold on. The consciousness was already turbid, the muscles of the hands were weakening, when the water suddenly left, leaving behind a dirty foam. Having recovered their breath and regained their senses, people began to hastily leave the shore, leaving for high river terraces. Everyone understood that others would inevitably follow the first wave.

When it dawned, tired and frozen people realized that the ocean had calmed down and it was possible to go down to the village. We walked cautiously, meeting on the way heaps of garbage, shrubs uprooted with roots, mountains of reclaimed earth. On the site of the village lay miserable ruins. There were no three warehouses filled with food and equipment at all, just as there were no three houses and tents. Carried away timber, barrels into the ocean. Tractors, cars, kungas and ten metal tanks with fuels and lubricants were badly damaged. True, the steamer "Saltykov-Shchedrin" was in place and gave loud, drawn-out beeps.

There was a lot of rubbish floating along the shore. In addition, it was assumed that some of the people could be carried into the ocean, so the expedition leader decided to examine the debris and coastal waters. Fortunately, the Iceberg motor boat remained intact, on which the foreman of the boat Tarasov and Pervago himself immediately went to sea. They managed to find several dead bodies.

It was soon established that nine people had died: the driller Maistrenko, the kungas worker Subtilny and his four children, the wife and child of the turner Parshin, and also the woman who had remained forever unknown, who arrived on the expedition for employment.

In the village of Kronoki itself, two people went missing. The wave demolished two residential buildings and a store, and the first-aid post was damaged.

On the shore of Morzhovaya Bay, located in the northern part of the Shipunsky Peninsula, there was a settlement of whalers Aleut, in which several families remained for the winter. Here, the tsunami destroyed absolutely all the houses and industrial buildings. People caught in the waves were carried into the ocean. The adults managed to hold on and then get out into shallow water, but the children did not have enough strength for this. After the survivors gathered together, mournful cries were heard over the bay. It was the parents, distraught with grief, mourning the missing children. All the children of Druzhinin, the head of the base, died, except for the eldest daughter, who lived in a boarding school in the village of Zhupanovo.

There was no communication, and the base workers did not know that they were not the only ones who survived the disaster. It seemed to them that God was angry only with them. After conferring, they decided that the strongest of the men, Beloshitsky, would go 18 kilometers to the meteorological post at Cape Shipunsky, in order to report from there by radio to Petropavlovsk about what had happened. Half-dressed, frozen, hungry, he set off without delay. There was no road to the weather station, so I went straight through the mountains and along the river valleys.

The beginning of November in this part of Kamchatka is almost winter. It was possible not to be afraid of the bears that go in herds here in the summer. However, the predators were driven out of the dens by a night earthquake. One such poor fellow got in the way of Beloshitsky. He got scared and climbed up the rock. The stones were just sprinkled with snow and covered with a layer of ice. His leg slipped, there was nothing to grab onto with his hands, and Beloshitsky flew down. He fell so that he lost consciousness. When he woke up, he found that his head, arms and legs were badly beaten. The bruised chest hurt. I tried to get up, but the pain in my legs and hypochondrium did not allow me to do so. Also, my head was spinning. And then he crawled. Later, he broke off a stick and walked, leaning on it.

In the middle of the day, he, bloody, tired, in a semi-conscious state, stumbled into the meteorological post. Frightened meteorologists listened to him, then gave him strong tea to drink, helped him wash, bandaged his wounds. Immediately, a radiogram went on the air to Petropavlovsk: "Walrus people are in distress. One person arrived on duty in a serious condition. There are victims, wounded. There is nothing but linen, they need help. Shipunsky post."

To the south of Cape Shipunsky, at the mouth of the Nalycheva River, there was a settlement of the same name, in which there was a branch of the fishing artel named after Lenin. 39 people lived here.

The first wave of the tsunami smashed and washed into the sea all the houses except for two. People ran to more elevated places, beyond the estuary. But the water overtook five and carried them away. They all died.

The survivors - shod and half-dressed - came to the frontier post, located six kilometers from the village. The outpost was not damaged by the tsunami. Her chief Eliseev received and accommodated people.

Severo-Kurilsk is located on the bank of the narrow and not very deep Second Kuril Strait, which separates the island of Paramushir, on which the city is located, and the island of Shumshu. In the direction of the Pacific Ocean, the strait expands somewhat, forming a kind of funnel, sandwiched by rocky shores. The tsunami rushed into this funnel, and the more it narrowed, the higher the waves rose, their destructive power increased. That is why Severo-Kurilsk received the most powerful blow compared to other settlements that fell into the tsunami zone. As a result, the city was completely destroyed.

Severo-Kurilsk was built by the Japanese in 1940-43. It was a small fishing town called Kashiwabara. In it, the Japanese had the main management of fisheries in the North Kuril Islands. In August 1945, the islands again passed to us. There were many Japanese villages on the coast, and all of them began to be settled by Soviet fishermen and military personnel. For a while, the Japanese also lived here, but soon they were all evicted. The center of the new Severo-Kurilsky region of the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk region of the USSR was the former Kasivabara, named Severo-Kurilsky.

The local history museum of Severo-Kurilsk keeps a photo album made by documentary filmmaker Boris Vasilyevich Prokakhin in 1946. All photos of the album are dedicated to the city of that time. Perhaps this is the only thing left of the city, which no longer exists. But then, in 1946, he had just begun to rebuild in the Russian way, and the people in the photographs are still alive and happy with the happiness of the new settlers. They build a city, a stadium, barracks, fish, explore their island, go in for sports, soldiers do drills. There are smiles on the faces.

In that autumn of 1946, Boris Prokahin was filming the film "The Kuril Islands" and at the same time took many photographs. The album is made up of them.

The current Severo-Kurilsk, rebuilt after the tragedy of 1952, is located in a different place - on a hill and at a greater distance from the sea. And there are almost no traces of the old city left. "Over there, where the sheds are now, there was a stadium," say the North Kurils, pointing to a wasteland located between the modern city and the sea. The stadium was large, with high stands, concrete gates in the Soviet retro style.

Perhaps, only a monument to the Hero of the Soviet Union, Senior Lieutenant S. A. Savushkin, who died during the capture of the Kuriles by Soviet troops, remained from those times. The monument tilted under the blows of the waves, but resisted. He is alone and resembles the time "before the tsunami". And, of course, it remains in the memory of people. Every year on November 5, residents of Severo-Kurilsk hold a mourning meeting at the cemetery, at which a few witnesses of those terrible events speak.

On the fateful night of November 4-5, 1952, at about 4 am local time, the residents of the city were awakened by a strong earthquake. Dishes fell on the floor, lamps and lampshades swayed, chimneys collapsed, doors opened, glass burst in the windows. People were running into the streets. Fortunately, the weather was unusually warm, only in some places there were spots of snow that had fallen the day before. The moon was shining in the sky. Having managed to get used to fairly frequent shaking during their life on the island, people quickly calmed down, especially since no major damage was visible. trampled on fresh air many, yawning, returned to their warm beds.

The earth continued to shake slightly when the head of the North Kuril police department, senior lieutenant of state security P. M. Deryabin, went to the regional department to check on the prisoners languishing in the penal colony. There were 22 of them. “On the way to the regional department, I observed cracks in the ground ranging in size from 5 to 20 centimeters, formed as a result of an earthquake,” he will write later in a report. is on the ground. At this time, there were no shocks, the weather was very calm. "

Tamara Nikolaevna Avliyarova was then 14 years old, she lived in a boarding school in Severo-Kurilsk. “We were awakened by an earthquake,” she writes. “Our teacher first decided that we would not go anywhere, we would wait until it was all over.

Approximately 45 minutes after the earthquake, a strong rumble was heard from the ocean. “Looking back, we saw a high water shaft advancing from the sea to the island,” continues his report, the head of police, P.M. immediately, the bullpen became the first victim of water... I gave the order to open fire with personal weapons and shout "Water is coming!", while retreating to the hills. ) and run to the hills".

... "And then we heard a rumor: water!" says Avliyarova. all in the direction of the Fifth Hill. Soldiers in underpants ran ahead of me, and I myself didn’t have time to dress properly. But it was already very cold, in some places there was snow. Most of the people who left the dying city gathered on the Fifth Hill.

It seemed to people that their island was sinking into the depths of the sea - the water that rushed to land was so high. Grabbing children, people ran to the hills. But the wave was already destroying the first buildings, drowning out the screams of the drowning with a crash.

A few minutes later, the wave subsided back into the sea, taking with it everything destroyed, as well as hundreds of victims. She left the shore so rapidly that the bottom of the strait was exposed, shining in moonlight from numerous puddles and wet stones. And then there was an ominous silence. The frightened residents of Severo-Kurilsk did not yet know that there would be a second wave, more powerful, higher and more destructive. After waiting for some time, they began to timidly descend from the hills to see what had become of their dwellings. And, of course, to find out what happened to their relatives and friends who remained in the city or fell behind during the run.

The second wave came 20 minutes after the first. “A formidable water shaft 10-15 meters high was rapidly rolling along the strait,” says the certificate of the deputy head of the Sakhalin Regional Police Department, Lieutenant Colonel Smirnov, who arrived on the island as part of a commission immediately after the disaster and conducted a detailed interview of witnesses. “The shaft with noise and roar crashed on the northeastern ledge of Paramushir Island in the area of ​​the city of Severo-Kurilsk.After breaking on it, one wave rolled further along the strait in a northwestern direction, destroying the coastal structures on the Shumshu and Paramushir Islands on its way, and the other, describing an arc along The North-Kuril lowland in the south-east direction, collapsed on the city of Severo-Kurilsk.It rotated furiously around the depression, with rapid, convulsive jerks, washing away to the ground all the buildings and structures located on the ground 10-15 meters above sea level. the water shaft in its rapid movement was so huge that small in size, but heavy in weight, the object you - machine tools installed on rubble bases, one and a half ton safes, tractors, cars - were torn from their places, circled in a whirlpool along with wooden objects, and then scattered over a huge area or carried away into the strait.

This second wave was not only powerful but also insidious. She, retreating with the same force with which she swept ashore, hit the rear of the city. She began to slide into the valley of the stream, which divided Severo-Kurilsk into two parts, moreover, approximately in the middle. Rapidly going down, the water formed a huge whirlpool, into which people who had weakened in an unequal struggle were sucked. Sucked in hundreds. In addition, water hit the coastal rampart in front of the seaport, destroying it and throwing fishing boats, boats and barges into the strait.

“The whole city was destroyed by this wave and most of the population died,” writes M.P. Deryabin. “The water of the second wave did not have time to descend, when the water gushed for the third time and carried almost everything that was from the buildings in the city into the sea ... Strait , separating the islands of Paramushir and Shumshu, was completely filled with floating houses, roofs and other debris. The surviving people, frightened by what was happening, threw their things in a panic and, losing their children, rushed to run higher into the mountains. "

Those who ran away from the first wave to the Fifth Hill and remained there peered in fear into the predawn murk, trying to understand what was happening below, in the city. And there - "black, black, it was impossible to really see anything, only darkness that enveloped the city, and the sound of water" (T. N. Avliyarova).

Police Lieutenant Colonel Smirnov: “Despite the tragedy of this disaster, the vast majority of the population did not lose their heads, moreover, at the most critical moments, many nameless heroes performed lofty heroic deeds: risking their lives, they saved children, women, the elderly. Here are two girls leading an old woman by the arm. Pursued by the approaching wave, they try to run faster towards the hill. The old woman, exhausted, sinks to the ground in exhaustion. But the girls, through the noise and roar of the approaching elements, shout to her: "We won't leave you anyway, let us all drown together." They pick up the old woman in their arms and try to escape, but at that moment the oncoming wave picks them up and throws them all together on a hill.

Losev's mother and young daughter, escaping on the roof of their house, were thrown into the strait by a wave. Calling for help, they were noticed by people on the hill. Soon, in the same place, not far from the floating Losevs, a little girl was noticed on the board, as it later turned out, the three-year-old Embankment Svetlana, who miraculously escaped, disappeared, then reappeared on the crest of the wave. From time to time she tucked her blond hair, fluttering in the wind, with her hand back, which indicated that the girl was alive. The strait at that time was completely filled with floating boards, roofs, various demolished property, and especially fishing gear that interfered with the navigation of boats. The first attempts to break through on boats were unsuccessful - solid blockages prevent moving forward, and fishing tackle is wound on propellers. But then a boat separated from the coast of the island of Shumshu, which slowly makes its way forward through the rubble. Here he comes to the floating roof, the crew of the boat quickly removes the Losevs, and then carefully removes Svetlana from the board. The people watching them with bated breath breathed a sigh of relief. Only during the run-up to the city of Severo-Kurilsk, the population and the command of various watercraft picked up and rescued more than 15 children lost by their parents, removed 192 people from roofs and other floating objects in the strait, the Sea of ​​\u200b\u200bOkhotsk and the ocean.

The trouble stunned the majority of the population of the ruined city. Of the surviving residents, there were few who would not have lost their loved ones. People got depressed. And on the site of the city formed a real wasteland.

Soon reconnaissance aircraft from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky appeared over the island. They inspected the area, took pictures, dropped instructions on how to send various signals from the ground. This somewhat brought people back to reality, gave them hope for the possible speedy end of the sorrows and misfortunes that fell upon them.

On the ocean side of Paramushir Island there were several residential settlements - Shkilevo, Baza Boevaya, Podgorny, Okeansky, Galkino, Coastal, Kamenny, Reef, Levashovo, Ozerny, Cliff, Savushkino (in the strait, at the outlet to the Sea of ​​Okhotsk), Putyatino (a little further than Savushkino ).

All these villages also fell into the tsunami zone. Shkilevo, located in the very south of the island, behind the Cape of Count Vasiliev, was not affected, out of 12 residents, no one died. The Combat Base was mothballed even before the disaster, there were no people. The village is completely destroyed. A whale plant was located in Podgorny, more than 500 people lived. The village was destroyed, 97 inhabitants survived. Galkino was completely destroyed, but the population managed to escape. The same thing happened in Coastal and Stone. In Rifovoe, too, there were no casualties, but residential buildings and industrial facilities were washed into the ocean. Washed away Levashovo, but people survived. About a hundred people lived in Utesnoye, the village was destroyed, but there were no casualties.

Great sacrifices were made in Shelekhovo. A large fish factory was located here, more than 800 people lived. 102 survived. The village itself was almost not damaged.

Savushkino, or Avangard, is a settlement of military and fish processors. It was located on Cape Oval. No destruction, no casualties here, fortunately. did not take place.

About the village of Okeansky - a separate story. It was located in the bay of the same name on a low, sandy shore at the foot of a small, lonely hill, called Dunkina by the inhabitants. The population of Okeansky was more than a thousand people, people were employed at the fish processing plant, caviar and canning factories. A fairly comfortable settlement - with a power plant, mechanical workshops, industrial refrigerators, a school, a hospital, etc. In addition, there was a large herd of cattle. Warehouses before the winter were filled with food. Listed, for example, are several hundred tons of flour, tens of tons of cereals, oats, dozens of barrels of alcohol.

The village was founded by the Japanese. It was a fishing and processing center for ocean shore Paramushir. It was good to catch here, the fish factory, which became Russian, flourished. From the Japanese, the Russians also got a capital stone pier. It served as a breakwater that covered the bay from ocean waves. Two more piers were built next to it, but they were light, temporary. It was the watchman who first noticed the approaching tsunami wave. A huge, rumbling shaft, angrily gleaming in the moonlight with millions of water sprays.

The shaft rolled obliquely to the shore, so the solid, Japanese pier could not withstand the side impact of the water and literally crumbled into separate concrete blocks. These huge, heavy blocks were scattered along the shore like pebbles.

Almost immediately, a wave hit the factory shops of a large cannery and completely destroyed it in a matter of seconds. When the wave left, only fat melters and seamers remained from the plant.

Later, the tragic fate of Okeansky was described in detail by the Kuril local historian, a former deviator from Severo-Kurilsk, S. Antonenko. His essay "Ocean" was published in the newspaper "Kuril Rybak" in 1990. The former chairman of the Ocean Village Council, Elena Mikhailovna Melnikova, and the former director of the local fish factory, Mikhail Alexandrovich Bernikov, provided the author with great help in collecting materials.

“The Melnikovs’ house stood at the very foot of Dunkina Sopka,” writes S. Antonenko in an essay. “All its inhabitants, who went out into the courtyard after they were awakened by powerful tremors, saw the whole village and the buildings of the fish processing plant somewhat from above. the expanse of the ocean, stretching as far as the eye could see, to the very horizon. An earthquake, surpassing in strength all that had hitherto disturbed the island land, woke up all the inhabitants of the village. People approached each other, shared their impressions, wondering about what might follow it, told who has something in the house fallen or collapsed ...

The director of the fish factory, like the rest, after the first shocks of the earthquake, went outside the house ... Bernikov immediately realized the danger of what was happening and began to wake up sleeping people with loud cries, urging them to quickly and without delay leave their homes under the open sky. But not everyone heeded his calls ... "

The impact of the first wave of the tsunami was terrible. S. Antonenko describes it like this:

“Water! Ocean! Wave! Look!” disturbing and loud exclamations scattered through the air. But the noise that filled everything around drowned out these belated cries. doomed structure, tried to snatch his children who were in a sweet dream out of bed, someone screamed heart-rendingly, trying to wake those who were still sleeping in their rooms ...

These were the last moments of the nightmare that ended many human lives now. And now a many-kilometer-long water shaft, boiling and swirling with terrible cosmos of foam, collapsed on the shore and swallowed up everything that lived, breathed, screamed and rushed about in the last hope a fraction of a second ago ...

Confused and frightened people fled in all directions. Some ran upstairs, others circled around their houses in confusion, trying to do something, save someone, do something. Still others, confused, ran down into the valley. Many, who had not yet come to their senses from the recently subsided tremors, were afraid to run to where Bernikov called them - to Dunkina Hill, which is now the only saving place. And they were afraid because they knew about the former Japanese artillery depot located in its thickness with a huge stock of bombs and artillery shells.

Dunkina Sopka was the only elevation in this area. But its foot was surrounded by a wide, sheer ditch 3 to 5 meters deep - the so-called counterscarp dug by the Japanese as part of the security system of the ammunition depot located in the underground warehouse. Part of this ammunition, according to the testimony of the inhabitants of Paramushir, is still there, local hunters extract gunpowder from the shells. And then the warehouse was full, so the security system was kept in relative good order. The people who ran to Dunkina Sopka ran into the ditch, unable to overcome it. And the wave was coming. Many died in front of the moat or inside it, climbing up the sheer wall.

But most people remained in the village, many never left their homes. All of them, with very few exceptions, died. When, after the departure of the first wave, the director of the fish factory went downstairs to reach the radio station and report to Severo-Kurilsk about what had happened, he did not find not only his office, but also the hospital attached to it. And there were people in the hospital, including several women in labor. Everyone was swallowed up by the ocean.

And yet, someone managed to find among the wreckage. Many were already dead, some choked in the water, some crushed by debris, including the bodies of the chief engineer of the fish factory Kalmykov, deputy director Mikhailov. But there were also wounded. They began to be carried upstairs, to the house of the chairman of the village council, Melnikova. Behind this occupation, people were caught by a second, more powerful wave. She finally smashed the village and factories, took a few more victims. The grandmother and girls Katya, Tanya and Zhenya from the family of Captain Novak died. The whole family of the foreman of the fishing workshop Popov died with three children, the teacher Taisiya Alekseevna Rezanova died with three of her children, the whole family of the worker Sharygin died, only the mother, Nina Vasilievna, of the large Nevorotov family, survived ... In total, 460 dead were counted in Okeansky. This is according to official data, but people believe that much more died, because many delayed seasonal workers were not registered in the village council, and the papers of the factories and the fish processing plant were swept into the ocean.

“Many people were carried to the spit, which jutted out into the ocean for several hundred meters in the southwestern part of the bay,” writes S. Antonenko. and prayed for help. But it is unlikely that any of them managed to wait for it. They froze to death on the icy stones of the spit. Others, who tried to swim to the shore, also died, and only a few of them, perhaps, were among those who was later rescued by the Zh-220 boat that approached from Galkino.

Shumshu Island, the closest to the Kamchatka Peninsula, unlike the neighboring Paramushir, is almost flat and low-lying, without large vegetation. But the coast is high. A large number of military units were located on the island, and on its ocean side there were the fishing villages of Babushkino, Dyakovo, Kozyrevsky. The largest was the village of Kozyrevsky, in which there were two fish factories and more than a thousand people lived. Both factories were destroyed, but people, with the exception of 10 people, managed to escape into the tundra.

In Babushkino, in the very south of the island, there was also a fish factory. More than 500 people lived in the village. In 2001, two old-timers of the village, Maria Dmitrievna Annenkova and Uliana Markovna Velichko, both women born in 1928, spoke about how the tsunami was transferred there. Ulyana Markovna Velichko arrived in Babushkino with her parents on June 18, 1950. In the same year, in the fall, she got married. My husband served on the island, and when he was demobilized, he decided to stay and got a job in a fish factory. In 1951 their daughter was born.

The village of Babushkino is on a high bank, above the ocean. Below, under the coastal cliff - all the production left over from the Japanese - a fish factory, a cannery, a caviar shop, two large refrigerators.

“We lived in a barrack, behind the wall are my parents,” says Ulyana Markovna. There was an earthquake about a month before the tsunami. Japanese barracks, old, all our stoves flew. Just repaired them, settled down ... "

“That year there were a lot of fish,” recalls Maria Dmitrievna Annenkova, who arrived in Babushkino in 1952 on a recruitment trip from the city of Arsenyev in Primorsky Krai. - First, we, seasonal workers, were kept on cod, then red fish went. I started working in the caviar shop, they didn’t sit idle, the fish went and went. In October, our caviar was transported to Severo-Kurilsk and our brigade was removed and sent there to help. At the end of October, we managed, it was time to return to Babushkino. And then a blizzard blew out, for two weeks they could not get over to their island. Finally, on November 4, we were taken home. We landed in the evening, and at night this terrible tragedy happened.

When it shook on the night of November 5, the inhabitants of the barracks in which the family of Ulyana Markovna Velichko lived jumped up. At Velichko's stove again crumbled. The husband managed to put on only one boot, picked up his daughter in his arms and ran out of the house. “Many families lived in the barracks, but there were only two doors,” says Ulyana Markovna. - They got out. We kept a cow, so we piled a stack of hay in the yard. It was dark, only the ground, lightly powdered with snow, was white. We all huddled together near this stack and stood like that, peering into the dark sea rustling below.

“I lived in a Japanese semi-dugout with a young teacher of literature,” continues the story of M. D. Annenkova. We woke up from the earthquake. It was dark and scary. We put pillows on our heads so that the ceiling, if anything, would not crush, and began to sing “Our formidable“ Varyag ”does not surrender to the enemy ... We were young. Besides, it was shaking more than once, we knew what it was. street, people are screaming. Then we also ran into the street.”

Babushkintsev was saved by a high bank. All industrial buildings located below, under the shore, were destroyed and washed away. And the residential village was practically not damaged. People sat outside their dwellings until dawn, lit fires, warmed themselves. And in the morning planes appeared and started dropping bags of food and medicines.

The ship "Vychegda" left the port of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky on November 1. He was supposed to go around Kamchatka from the south and arrive at the village of Ozernovsky, where he was carrying 600 tons of food.

On the evening of November 2, the ship entered the First Kuril Strait. It got dark. The weather deteriorated sharply, a northeast wind blew. The radio operator brought Captain Smirnov a radio message saying that a storm of up to 11-12 points was expected in the Sea of ​​Okhotsk. In order not to take risks, the captain decided to return from the strait to the ocean and drift in the area of ​​Cape Lopatka, the southern tip of Kamchatka.

Only two days later, on the evening of November 4, the weather improved, and the Vychegda went on its course. At about one o'clock on the fatal night of November 5, they passed the First Kuril Strait and entered the Sea of ​​Okhotsk. By 4 o'clock in the morning they approached the village of Ozernovsky. Exactly at four, the crew felt a strong vibration of the ship's hull. It lasted 8-10 minutes. No one doubted that it was an earthquake.

At 05:34, Captain Smirnov received a radiogram: "As a result of an earthquake in Severo-Kurilsk, the city went under water. I ask the ships located in the Northern Kuriles to immediately go to Severo-Kurilsk to save people. Captain of the Krasnogorsk ship Belov."

It was known that the Krasnogorsk was unloading in the roadstead of Severo-Kurilsk, so its captain, of course, was in control of the situation. Without hesitation and without delay, Smirnov gave the command to head for Severo-Kurilsk. All night long, while the Vychegda was in a hurry to help people, its crew was preparing lifting devices, nets, cables and ladders.

At about 10 o'clock in the morning we approached the Second Kuril Strait from the north. Here began to meet logs floating in the sea, furniture, rags, barrels, boxes, bags. The closer the steamer approached the strait, the more various debris and debris floated on the water. People free from the watch were on deck and peered anxiously at the sea.

Soon empty, uncontrolled boats, barges and even seiners were carried away from the strait. There was no doubt - the catastrophe happened grandiose. In addition, the radio operator brought more and more disturbing radiograms coming from Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk to the captains of ships in the area. Judging by them, several steamships and warships were already hastening to Severo-Kurilsk.

At 10:20 a.m. on one of the barges, which were carried by the current, they noticed a man waving his arms invitingly. Half an hour later, the crew of the Vychegda managed to take the barge in tow, and the frozen, frightened sailor was taken on board.

Not far away, two empty seiners rocked on the water. They seemed completely intact, so throwing them into the sea to the mercy of fate seemed to Smirnov an unforgivable luxury. He decided to take them in tow too.

At this time, the sailors distinguished in the water a huge number of fragments of houses and various belongings. All this was carried away by the current into the open sea. Then the barge and seiners were anchored, and they themselves quickly went to the discovered wreckage. But no one was found among them.

After that, they began to enter the Second Kuril Strait in order to go to Severo-Kurilsk. Opposite Cape Chibuiny, we met a seiner and two boats, half-submerged, broken on the rocks. There were no living or dead people on them and next to them.

Soon the strait narrowed, the shores of two islands opened at once - Shumshu and Paramushir. The places flooded by the tsunami were well distinguished. They were dark with moisture, accumulated debris and destroyed vegetation. Vertically, the strip reached up to 12 meters in some places, with an average height of 7-8 meters.

On the site of the village of Baikovo, located on the island of Shumshu, houses located above the dark strip have been preserved. But most of the village still collapsed and was a pile of garbage. People were visible on the elevated parts of the shore. They were still afraid to go down to the ruins of their houses, remaining at a safe distance from the sea. Some people gave calling signs with their hands, but the islanders were in no hurry to go down to the water. It seems that no one led their rescue on the shore, and people were left to their own devices. Surely many of them have not yet recovered from the shock, they needed medical attention. In addition, it remained unknown whether they were provided with food and clothing.

Having passed Baikovo, "Vychegda" approached Severo-Kurilsk. The picture that opened to the sailors shocked them. The city was in a lowland, and now it was all wiped off the face of the earth. Only a few buildings that were above the level of the tsunami survived. People, as in Baikovo, fled to high places. Only a few wandered among the ruins. Behind Cape Oporny, opposite the mouth of the Matrosskaya River, the ship "Krasnogorsk" was anchored.

All the water of the strait near the city was strewn with fragments of buildings, furniture, various utensils, half-submerged boats, boats and kungas. A dozen boats, a fish minesweeper and two seiners floated among this garbage. They were looking for people. Raised from the water and the most valuable property.

"Vychegda" tried to keep up everywhere, but it remained unclear to Smirnov who was coordinating the work to save people and provide assistance here. On this occasion, he requested a radiogram from the head of the Kamchatka-Chukotka shipping company PS Chernyaev. Soon the answer came from him: "To Smirnov. Organize the reception of people from the shore, using your boats, putting experienced rowers in them, led by your assistants. Report, there are no products in the hold, you bake, there is no bread? Do you have any contact with General Duka? Yours "You are satisfied with the information, continue to report in detail the situation with the rescue. Full information about the disaster is desirable. Please note that doctors have been airlifted to you. Chernyaev, Regional Communist Party Melnikov."

It was already something. Now it was required to find General Dooku on the shore - the commander of the garrison on the island of Paramushir.

At 13:45 local time, Smirnov radioed to Petropavlovsk: “I have no connection with the shore. There are a lot of people on the hills above the village. Apparently they are afraid to go down. collection of people, boarding by boats and barges. Give the call signs and the wave of the general. They haven't organized on the shore yet."

The situation did not allow waiting for General Duca to be found on the air. Then Smirnov sent his assistant ashore to either find the general or organize the delivery of people aboard the Vychegda himself. When the assistant left on the boat, Smirnov sent another radiogram to Petropavlovsk:

"To Chernyaev. An assistant was sent to communicate with the shore and organize the loading of passengers. The ships underway can be informed that no changes in depths were found in the strait - the strait was passed twice. If there are a lot of people, I suppose they will put them in the stern hold for bag food."

About three o'clock in the afternoon, the captain's assistant arrived on the shore. There were three assistant captains on the Vychegda - senior assistant A. G. Shiryaev, second assistant S. M. Lebedev and third assistant N. A. Alexandrov. It was not possible to establish which of them went ashore.

On the shore there was a complete organizational disorder. People experienced a lot of stress, so many tried to find oblivion in alcohol. Fortunately, shops and stalls were smashed with water, in deep pits that turned into puddles, one could easily find a bottle or two, or even a whole barrel of alcohol. An appetizer in the form of canned food, as well as sausage sealed in barrels, was also present.

Soon a rumor spread that an even higher and stronger wave was expected, up to 50 meters, so people were nervous, panicking. Having bypassed the ruins left from their dwellings, having picked up some of the things, they again hurried to climb higher into the hills. Those who managed to take a strong sip of alcohol were no longer afraid of anything.

People also said that they saw among the living the chief of the fleet and the chief engineer of the local fish trust, but neither one nor the other appeared on the shore. The head of the trust, Mikhail Semenovich Alperin, died, his body was found and identified. Nobody saw General Dooku either. They showed him to the other end of the city, where he could be, but how to get there through the ravines and the chaos of destruction, the assistant captain of the Vychegda had no idea.

Having hardly crossed into the city on a boat, the assistant clearly understood that this transport was not suitable for the mass transportation of people to the ship. Firstly, the distance to the Vychegda was large, and secondly, the current in the strait was constantly changing. And people often did not agree to leave the shore, fearing for the remains of their property or simply not trusting the boat. Only young soldiers willingly climbed into the boat, who still had nowhere to go, no one gave them any commands, since the officers either died or were engaged in saving their household property.

Having achieved no result in the search for General Duka or any of the other local leaders, the assistant captain put 30 people, mostly soldiers, into the boat and went back to the Vychegda. Separate boats also continued to deliver people to the ship, but there were very few who wanted to. During the day, about 150 people were brought on board.

The entire crew of the Vychegda took part in helping the rescued people. As soon as a loaded boat approached the board, sailors led by boatswain A. Ya. Ivanov rushed to the deck to quickly lift the brought islanders up. They were placed where they could, they even gave away their berths and cabins. In the galley, the cook A. N. Krivogornitsyn and the baker D. A. Yuryeva worked tirelessly, trying to feed, drink tea, warm tired and hungry people without delay. Engineers and stokers of the night watch did not go to rest, knowing that their reliefs were working on deck. In the absence of a doctor on the ship, the barmaid A.P. Tolysheva, orderly S.S. Makarenko, cleaning lady L.R. Trotskaya and sailor A.I. Kuznetsov provided first aid to the wounded as best they could. The head of the ship's radio station A. I. Mironov and the radio operator V. P. Plakhotko were constantly in touch. "We need a doctor, we urgently need a doctor," they kept broadcasting the captain's radiograms.

And other ships were already hurrying to Severo-Kurilsk at full speed, which turned out to be nearby on this alarming morning.

The scale of the tragedy that played out on the southeastern coast of Kamchatka and the northern Kuril Islands finally became clear by noon on November 5th. There was practically no settlement left in this territory that would not have been destroyed. In addition to the above, tsunami waves hit Kamchatka villages in Malaya Sarannaya, Vilyui, Malaya Zhirovaya and Bolshaya Zhirovaya bays, the fish base of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Khodutka Bay, and the weather station at Cape Piratkov. Even in the south of the western, Sea of ​​Okhotsk coast of Kamchatka, in the village of Ozernovsky, a large wave was noted. And almost everywhere, except for Ozernovsky and Khodutka, there were destruction and casualties. ABOUT in large numbers the dead were reported from Bolshaya Zhirovaya Bay, where 81 people were missing. In Malaya Zhirovaya, 33 people died, in the bays of Sarannaya and Vilyui, a total of 29 people. In Severo-Kurilsk, the victims generally numbered in the thousands.

The operational headquarters, created in Petropavlovsk, worked in an enhanced mode. Every two hours, all the commanders of large military formations gathered in the regional committee of the CPSU and reported to the commission on the work done and plans for the near future. Here, actions were coordinated and decisions binding on all were made.

The head of the transport department of the Kamchatka regional committee of the CPSU, V. Z. Melnikov, coordinated constant radio communication with all ships in the disaster zone. Each ship was given an individual task to save people. The actions of the ships assigned to Vladivostok were also coordinated by radio with the headquarters created there. Still, there were not enough ships, many places on the Kamchatka coast remained unexplored. Then it was decided to send military aircraft of the air corps of General Gribakin for reconnaissance.

Aircraft surveyed the eastern coast of Kamchatka from Cape Kronotsky in the north to Cape Lopatka in the south. Comparing the reports of the pilots, it was already possible to confidently speak about the height of the tsunami. The maximum wave height was 12 meters and was observed on the Shipunsky Peninsula, 7-8 meters - in the area of ​​Cape Povorotny, 5 meters - in other places of the coast.

In addition to reconnaissance flights, aircraft delivered doctors, clothing, and food to separate disaster zones.

In the afternoon, a radiogram came from Moscow from the Minister of the Armed Forces of the USSR, Marshal A. M. Vasilevsky. He reported that Admiral Kholostyakov was in charge of general management of the rescue work, but before he arrived at the place from Vladivostok, Rear Admiral L. N. Panteleev, commander of the Kamchatka military flotilla, should take command. An hour after receiving the radio message from Petropavlovsk, the destroyer Bystry left Petropavlovsk for Severo-Kurilsk, on board of which was Rear Admiral. A radiogram flew on the air: "To all ships located in the area of ​​Severo-Kurilsk, also the Kuril Islands. Vladivostok Savinov, Serykh. Panteleyev has been appointed to lead the government. His orders must be obeyed unquestioningly."

And in Petropavlovsk, work continued on collecting information from the disaster sites and preparing ships for their exit to certain areas. All this work was carried out by the head of the Kamchatka-Chukotka shipping company P.S. In a tough, strong-willed manner, they managed to prepare more than a dozen different courts for the release.

Not without street spies collecting information of a different kind around the city - about the mood of people, about possible alarmists and saboteurs. Here is a document reflecting this secret work:

"To the Secretary of the Kamchatka Regional Committee of the CPSU Comrade Solovyov.

Here.

Special message.

In connection with the November 5, 1952 earthquake and the continuation of minor tremors to the present, among the population of the mountains. In Petropavlovsk, panicky and sometimes provocative rumors are spread on a large scale.

A separate, most backward part of the population, frightened by what has happened, intends to leave Kamchatka in the near future, some are already selling their houses. This is especially the case in a shipyard.

The degree of panic is evidenced by such facts when the inhabitants of the village of Industrialny, who live in houses close to the sea, go to their relatives or friends who live in houses built up on the slopes of the mountains for the night.

A phenomenon has also assumed wide proportions in the city, when residents, expecting a possible repetition of strong shocks, dress their children at night, sleep dressed themselves and are ready to run to the mountains at the slightest alarm.

Such a situation naturally has a negative effect on the production activity of a significant part of the workers.

Here are some panic statements of the townspeople. On November 5, 1952, the senior mechanic of the Kamchatrybflot Vigursky V.P., in the presence of a number of people, stated: “Even if Kamchatka failed, it’s still of no use, one loss and torment for people. We don’t see white light on it, eat absolutely nothing, the climate is bad. People don't live, they suffer."

Mr. Polypchuk, living on the street. Ryabikovskaya, 41, apt. 8, said the following about the earthquake: "I thought the house would fall apart. It turns out that this volcano exploded. The Kuril Islands sank, many soldiers died, they were brought to Kamchatka not alive. We sent ships and planes with doctors to save people."

Gr-ka Sumina A. Ya., living on the street. Sovetskaya, 63 said: “One island was flooded in the North Kuril Islands. People were brought from there naked, and some were killed and wounded. Mom didn’t want to leave Kamchatka, but now she keeps saying: let’s leave. We are waiting for death every minute. we will perish, the whole of Kamchatka will perish."

Seaport winch Krylov N. S. said about the disaster: "Exploded underwater volcano, half of one island was torn off and drowned in the sea. Many people died. They say that only corpses, trees and houses float on the sea."

Timekeeper of Construction Trust No. 6 Blinova T. I. said: “An eruption of the Avachinsky volcano is expected, we have not slept for almost two weeks. Oh, how many people have died, it’s terrible! and where the devil has taken me!"

The dispatcher of the Kamchatrybflot Khludnev V. G. said: “The whole Zhirovaya Bay was demolished, and very few people were saved, and the children all died. The city of Severo-Kurilsk went under water, and then when the water receded, a plain remained. Terrible victims and poor children - all died."

Along with these purely panicky moods of the population, there is evidence of a hostile element using the earthquake as a pretext for spreading provocative anti-Soviet and religious rumors. So, on November 5, Kamchattorg toolmaker Lukyanov V.I. stated: “It was not a volcano that exploded, but an atomic bomb was dropped on the Kuril Islands. When I served in the army in the city of Nagasaki, I was an eyewitness to how the Americans first tested the atomic bomb ... "All her people are smart, but we are left with fools. Germany was defeated by America, not by us. Do you remember, the press and the Government issued the slogan "Catch up and overtake America"? Have you caught up? Here is the result for you today. This is preparation for the holiday. Today we live, and tomorrow we will not be. Maybe it is. Death will come to us only from water. Whoever leaves the houses will also perish."

Housewife E. I. Obodnikova, living on the street. Stroitelnaya, house number 65, said: “It was shaking great, and I thought that everything would fail and collapse, but somehow it survived. This earthquake happened because people angered God - it’s written in the Gospel, and this is not the last earthquake, there will be more. And by the end of the century, the whole earth will collapse, because they sinned a lot. In this earthquake, they remained alive because some people still believe in God, and God agreed to let them live, but made a warning ... The earthquake happened before the holiday because people forgot the old holidays, angered God, celebrate new holidays. Therefore, God, by his earthquake, warned not to forget him."

I am posting the above for information.

Head of the MGB Department for the Kamchatka Region Chernoshtan.

No words, the document is curious. But how could it backfire on the people whose names it mentions? Especially for the latter mentioned in it - toolmaker V.I. Lukyanov and housewife E.I. Obodnikova. After all, they fell into the category of the so-called "hostile element", and in those years it just didn’t get away with it and often ended in the arrest of people and their further disappearance from the face of the earth.

Reading the "special report" you feel the hurried, sweat-sticky, not very literate hands of outside agents. Of course, they attributed a lot of nonsense from themselves, but they conveyed the essence exactly: people did not know the truth, they used rumors, speculation, their own ideas about the nature of what happened. No one explained anything to them, they were forbidden to talk about the elements. Collecting information about all this almost 50 years after the incident, I am faced with sad facts when eyewitnesses of the tragedy do not have photographs of it. And after all, many filmed then. The late geologist Viktor Pavlovich Zotov took pictures of the destroyed Severo-Kurilsk in the spring of 1953, but soon destroyed them. “I was afraid that they would come to check, they would find us,” he admitted. “After all, they knew who was on the islands after the tragedy. it was clear - I developed, printed. But soon I burned it ... "

Anastasia Anisimovna Razdabarova worked as a photographer in Petropavlovsk since 1945. The earthquake of 1952 happened before her eyes, but she did not remove the consequences of it - she was wary of denunciation.

A few days after the disaster, approximately November 8-9, volcanologist, candidate of geological and mineralogical sciences Alexander Evgenievich Svyatlovsky answered questions from a correspondent of the newspaper Kamchatskaya Pravda, talking about the nature of the tsunami in general and specifically about the 1952 tsunami. But, alas, the conversation took place under the supervision of employees of the MGB, the correspondent was allowed to make a clean interview in triplicate, after which he was ordered to submit them for verification. Two copies were immediately destroyed (burned), and the third tightly lay down in a secret folder. So readers did not see this information. Now that it has been declassified and you can read it, you are surprised that, in principle, there is nothing secret, terrible in it to hide from readers. On the contrary, information could calm the frightened, nothing knowledgeable people. Here are some fragments of that interview (by the way, the word "tsunami" was written "tsunami"):

"Question: What caused the tidal wave that caused destruction on the Kuril Islands and on the Kamchatka coast?

Answer: A tidal wave (tsunami) was caused by an earthquake that occurred in the Pacific Ocean southeast of the city of Petropavlovsk. The earthquake occurred as a result of a sudden disturbance - a rupture of the earth's crust, under the influence of the displacement of which the ocean waters formed a wave that collapsed on the shores of the islands and peninsulas surrounding the Pacific Ocean.

Question: Why was the tidal wave destructive in Severo-Kurilsk and in the open bays of the eastern coast of Kamchatka, and was small in the Peter and Paul Bay?

Answer: Petropavlovsk is located in the depths of the bay, the entrance to which is protected by a narrow strait. The tsunami tidal wave broke at the entrance to the bay, and that part of it that entered the bay spread out over its entire latitude, losing height. Therefore, the wave in the bay was low, and not everyone noticed ... Thus, tidal waves caused by earthquakes in the Pacific Ocean do not pose a danger to the city of Petropavlovsk.

Question: Did the Kuril Islands sink as a result of the earthquake?

Answer: The Kuril Islands did not sink. Due to the great strength of the tidal wave, loose shores in the coastal area were washed away, soil and sand were washed away and carried away. Gullies and pits formed in the banks. This created the impression of subsidence in the area of ​​Severo-Kurilsk. In reality, there were no noticeable subsidences and uplifts in the region of the Kuril Islands and Kamchatka.

Question: Did the wave that flooded Severo-Kurilsk recede, or did the sea remain in place of the city?

Answer: Tidal waves within a few minutes after the onset went back to the sea, and its level remained the same as it was before the earthquake. Due to the fact that houses and roofs from Severo-Kurilsk were carried away by the waves into the strait, where they floated with the current, the impression from the aircraft was that the sea had been in the city area for a long time. It also created false rumors about the sinking of Severo-Kurilsk. In fact, the city has remained the same."

As mentioned above, in the afternoon of November 5, the destroyer Bystry left Petropavlovsk for Severo-Kurilsk, on board of which was Rear Admiral Lev Panteleev, acting head of rescue operations. He was still walking along the coast of Kamchatka, when all the ships working in Severo-Kurilsk and heading towards him were ordered to obey Rear Admiral. On the way, Panteleev received a radiogram from Petropavlovsk with the following content: “The ships Korsakov, Kashirstroy, and Uelen came to you at 12 o’clock local time, Sevzaples and Chapaev at 18 o’clock, Pacific Star at 20 o’clock , "Kamchatsky Komsomolets" at 18:00, SRT-649 - at 11:30, SRT-645 - at 14:00, SRT-669 - at 15:00. , ship "Nevelsk. Inform the expediency of the further direction of the vessels. Also left Vladivostok "Lunacharsky", "Novgorod", "Nakhodka", "Sovneft" and two ships of the Sakhalin Shipping Company. Solovyov. "

At 11:30 p.m., the captains were given the call sign of Rear Admiral Penteleev to establish independent communication with him.

By the night of November 5-6, a total of 27 different ships were approaching Severo-Kurilsk, including 8 warships and the rescue ship Naezdnik. In addition, the ship "Korsakov" went to the island of Onekotan, and "Voikov" - to the island of Matua. In addition, in Petropavlovsk, the ship "Anatoly Serov" was finishing unloading and was ready to immediately go to sea with warm clothes for the victims. It was a whole flotilla, ready to take up to 20 thousand victims from the shore. There would have been other ships if Panteleev had not stopped their exit when he realized that so many of them were not required. Alas, on the first day of the tragedy, no one could have known that several tens of thousands of people had died on the northern Kuril Islands. It remained to take out only about ten thousand survivors.

On the evening of November 5, the weather deteriorated sharply in the northern Kuril Islands and southern Kamchatka, it became very cold. The wind picked up, a storm was expected. Minesweepers and barges began to approach the ship "Vychegda" with a request to moor to it for the night. The captain of the Vychegda, Smirnov, agreed to this.

By one o'clock in the morning the wind increased to 6 points. In order to stay at anchor with a strong current in the strait and a rising wind, the Vychegda was forced to constantly work with machines at low and medium speed. The captains of the steamer "Krasnogorsk" and the steamer "Amderma" that had just approached soon could not stand such an exhausting struggle. They took off from the strait into the sea. "Vychegda" continued to fight heroically, since an emergency fish minesweeper was moored to it, it could not be moored.

At about 4 o'clock in the morning the wind rose to 8 points, and with a strong current to the north, the ship began to gradually move towards the Sea of ​​Okhotsk. Captain Smirnov was forced to give instructions to all ships moored to the Vychegda, except for the emergency minesweeper, to move away from the sides. But the drift of the ship continued, the anchor did not hold. During the night, the Vychegda moved a mile and a half from its former anchorage.

Only by 7 am on November 6, the wind began to subside. The ship weighed anchor and returned to the roadstead of Severo-Kurilsk. At dawn, they wanted to send a boat ashore, but the wind and current did not allow this to be done. Captain Smirnov sent a radiogram to Petropavlovsk informing the commission about the situation. "At 8 a.m. we got up again in the roadstead of Severo-Kurilsk. I'm calling boats. There is no connection with the shore. I can't send boats - a strong current. North-west wind of 7 points, snowfall. Some boats are at anchor, burning flares, they have no solarium or minders There are a lot of people on the shore, you can see them on the hills."

At 9 o'clock in the morning, the destroyer Bystry approached the Vychegda. One of the captain's assistants went to Rear Admiral Panteleev to report on the situation. In addition, in a letter to the admiral, Captain Smirnov asked him to firmly take control of the work of the North Kuril fish trust. “The death of a large number of boats and seiners directly in the strait occurred due to the negligent attitude of the surviving leaders of the fish trust,” the captain wrote, “whose self-propelled ships made no attempt to use the good weather in the afternoon of November 5, when almost all floating units, without teams, were near Severo-Kurilsk. In this respect, the watercraft of the Naval Forces did nothing, which picked up only a few barges with cargo. Vessels - boats and seiners of the fish trust - continued to die in the strait until the evening. "

When the sight cleared completely and the sea almost calmed down, the Vychegda managed to send a boat ashore with another captain's assistant. For General Duka, he carried a letter similar to the letter for Panteleev. Immediately, the following radio message went to Petropavlovsk, which said: “Panteleev arrived at 9 in the morning, began to familiarize himself with the situation. At 10 o’clock, he sent people to the shore to transport lifeboat. The distance to the shore is 1 mile, I can take 80 people with my boats in a day.

About noon a boat returned from the shore and brought people. It was said that some young soldiers could not be brought to the water in order to be put in a boat - so rabies developed in them after the catastrophe they saw with the mass death of their colleagues.

By 15 o'clock Panteleev managed to restore order on the shore. By this time, five more approaching ships stood in the roadstead. Boats with people began to approach the sides. By 18 o'clock "Vychegda" accommodated 700 people - mostly civilians, women and children. There was no more room, about which Smirnov notified the admiral. He ordered to immediately withdraw to Vladivostok. But the captain of the Vychegda violated the order and went to Petropavlovsk. He explained his decision as follows: “The reason for going to Petropavlovsk was a large number of people taken on board without the possibility of creating appropriate conditions for them for a long transition. People did not have enough warm clothes; transition, as well as the need to provide medical assistance to the seriously wounded and sick.

At 18:15 on November 6, the Vychegda withdrew from the roadstead of Severo-Kurilsk. The strait was already crowded with an unprecedented number of ships that had come here. Coming out of the strait, Smirnov risked hitting someone with his side.

Later, in the memorandum of the Secretary of the Kamchatka Regional Committee of the CPSU V.I. Alekseev to the Secretary of the Khabarovsk Regional Committee of the CPSU A.P. Efimov, a lot of space was given to the actions of the crew of the steamer "Vychegda" to save the inhabitants of Severo-Kurilsk. First, the entire crew was listed, after which it was said: “These comrades from the crew of the Vychegda steamship, the first ship that arrived for rescue work in the Severo-Kurilsk region, proved to be a very solid team. first aid, 818 people were delivered to Petropavlovsk.

When reading this memorandum, a discrepancy between the figures for the number of people taken out at Vychegda is striking. The captain of the Vychegda reported that he had taken 700 people on board, Alekseev's memorandum says 818. There are many such inconsistencies in the documents. The documents are serious, secret, but, apparently, for safety reasons, the numbers are deliberately confused, while the true numbers were shown in ciphers, which were then destroyed. For example, the death toll in Severo-Kurilsk cannot be precisely determined. There is oral evidence that about 50,000 people died. One of the witnesses was A. I. Nikulina, a resident of Petropavlovsk, who worked that year as a cryptographer in Glavkamchatrybprom. She saw it with her own eyes. Her colleagues were in Severo-Kurilsk, where they encrypted reports. According to A. I. Nikulina, one of the cryptographers returned to Petropavlovsk "touched" - he was so impressed by the terrible pictures of what he saw and the data that he encrypted.

“The tanks turned over in a wave,” A. I. Nikulina said. “A lot of policemen died at the hands of marauders. They guarded safes and other surviving valuables. They were killed. In general, there was a lot of looting.”

Of course, the terrible figure of 50,000 dead seems unbelievable. But how much then? Below, in the final chapter, an attempt will be made to calculate the number of victims.

So, by the end of the day on November 6, people who remained alive in Severo-Kurilsk and on the island of Shumshu began to be actively loaded onto ships. No matter how messy this happened, which is inevitable, the ships approached the islands relatively quickly. Look at the map - the distances are not small. Even from Petropavlovsk - almost 400 kilometers. Therefore, albeit too ideologically and pompously, in the spirit of that time, party secretary V.I. Alekseev wrote about this in his note, but, in fact, he wrote correctly: “People saw that in any natural disaster they would not be left to their fate The majority of the victims express their gratitude to our Soviet government, the Communist Party and personally to Comrade Stalin for their salvation and assistance and, despite the great personal material losses, as well as the death of their relatives and friends, striving to quickly settle down in certain places and work together with all our people for the good of the Motherland.

Lieutenant Colonel Smirnov, deputy head of the police department of the UMGB of the Sakhalin region, who later arrived in Severo-Kurilsk, conducted an inquiry into some facts of theft and looting that took place during the disaster. In particular, he dealt with the statement of a resident of the village of Shelekhovo Malyutin regarding the loss of property from his house. Among others, Pavel Ivanovich Smolin, the radio operator of logger (small fishing minesweeper) No. 636, was interrogated. The text of the interrogation protocol is interesting in that it describes the picture of the catastrophe seen from the sea.

So, P. I. Smolin showed:

"On the night of November 5, 1952, I, along with other fishermen, were at sea on a logger, they were fishing, or rather, they were in a bucket. At about 4 o'clock in the morning, a great shudder of the ship was felt on the logger. I and other fishermen understood this as an earthquake ... At night there was a storm warning of 6-7 on November 5. After the earthquake, our logger, under the command of Captain Lymar, was the first to go to sea.It was about 4 o'clock in the morning.

Walking along the Second Strait in the area of ​​​​Cape Banzhovsky, our logger was covered by the first wave several meters high. Being in the cockpit, I felt that our ship, as it were, was lowered into a hole, and then thrown high into the air. A few minutes later, a second wave followed and the same thing happened again. Then the ship went quietly, and the throws were not felt. The ship was at sea all day. Only at about 6 pm some military radio station told us: "Return to Severo-Kurilsk immediately. We are waiting at the apparatus, Alperin." I immediately reported to the captain, who immediately answered: "I am immediately returning to Severo-Kurilsk." By this time on board we had up to 70 centners of fish caught per day. Logger headed for Severo-Kurilsk.

On the way back, I contacted logger No. 399 by radio, asking the radio operator: "What happened to Severo-Kurilsk?" The radio operator Pokhodenko answered me: "Go to the rescue of people ... after the earthquake, the wave washed away Severo-Kurilsk. We are standing under the side of the ship, the steering is out of order, the propeller is bent." My attempts to contact Severo-Kurilsk were unsuccessful - he was silent. I contacted Shelekhovo. The radio operator answered me: “There was a strong earthquake in Severo-Kurilsk, maybe something happened” ... Even in the Sea of ​​Okhotsk, before reaching the Paramushir and Shumshu islands, the logger team, including me, saw the roofs of houses, logs, boxes floating towards the meeting , barrels, beds, doors. By order of the captain, the team was posted on the deck on both sides of the sides and on the bow in order to save people who were at sea. But no people were found. Throughout the entire journey of 5-6 miles, we observed the same picture: floating barrels, boxes, etc. in a dense mass ...

Arriving at the roadstead, our logger approached logger No. 399… whose captain asked our captain not to leave them… We replied that we would not leave and anchored. There was no contact with the coast. The time was about 2-3 am on November 6, 1952. They were waiting for the dawn. Fires were burning on the hills opposite Severo-Kurilsk. We thought that people were escaping on the hills, there were a lot of fires. As it began to dawn, I and others discovered that the city of Severo-Kurilsk had been washed away.

At about 8 o'clock in the morning, I and other sailors, under the command of the third mate of the captain Comrade Kryvchik, sailed on a boat to the cannery and then landed. On the site of the city, people, including the military, walked around - collecting corpses ... Having examined the place where the barrack in which I lived was located, I did not find any signs (of it) ... I did not find any things belonging to me - everything was demolished ...

My family - Anna Nikiforovna Smolina's wife, four-year-old son Alexander arrived on a refrigerator from Vladivostok on November 6th. She was on vacation and followed her son to the Krasnodar Territory, to her homeland ... I found her on a refrigerator on November 8th. Now the wife and son are on board the logger No. 636, they work as a cook.

After I did not find the hut where I lived, I left on a boat to my logger, taking on board people from the shore, including women and children. The logger's team continued to transport people on board.

On the 7th or 8th of November we received a radio message: "All people taken on board, from among those in distress, to transfer to the steamer," so we transferred all of them to the steamers, the names of which I do not remember. The evacuation of the civilian population was completed on November 9, and no more people came to us."

These bays are located on the eastern coast of Kamchatka, south of the entrance to Avacha Bay. On the banks of the Big Vilyui there was the village of Staraya Tarya (collective farm "Vilyui"), and in Malaya Sarannaya there was the base of the Avachinsky fish processing plant.

Eight houses, a shop, a food warehouse and a marina were destroyed in Stara Tarja. 21 people died.

In the bay of Malaya Sarannaya, eight residential buildings, a store, a warehouse were also smashed, the pier and the base were washed away. 7 people died.

Early in the morning, military sailors based in the inner bay of Yagodnaya hurried to help the fishermen. They provided assistance to the survivors, and also found and buried the dead. It was from Maslennikov, the duty officer of the Kamchatka military flotilla, that a radiogram was received in Petropavlovsk about what had happened in these bays. After the military, boats of the Avachinsky plant headed there headed by director N. Grekov.

By the evening of November 6, the Glavkamchatrybprom tugboat "Hercules" arrived in Malaya Sarannaya Bay. Barrels, logs, uprooted bushes and trees, and various household utensils still floated here in large numbers. At 18:30, the captain of the tug, Evgeny Ivanovich Chernyavsky, radioed to the city: “The boat returned from the shore. According to the director, they don’t need help, the boats abandoned food. There are 7 victims, no bodies were found. The base was destroyed, the village is whole. there are wounded, I can’t approach, it is necessary to send a boat. Lighten further actions. "

Subsequently, when all the dead were established, there were 28 of them in Staraya Tarya and Malaya Sarannaya.

To save people in Morzhovaya Bay, as well as other points adjacent to this part of the coast of Kamchatka, a medium-sized fishing trawler "Halibut", belonging to Glavkamchatrybprom, was sent. On board the trawler was Deputy Chairman of the Kamchatka Regional Executive Committee Shevchuk. Early in the morning of November 6, the "Halibut" approached the Shipunsky Peninsula.

At the entrance to Morzhovaya Bay, the crew noticed the brownish-yellow color of the snow along the banks. Apparently, it was the dirty splashes of tsunami waves mixed with earth and debris that scattered far around. And the fresh snow that fell last night sprinkled dirt, which came out through it in brown spots. The storm that had played out the day before was beginning to subside, but the waves were even bigger. Tufts of grass, shrubs, branches and even tree trunks floated throughout the bay. And when the trawler began to enter the narrow, elongated Bolshaya Walrus Bay, there was a noticeable increase in debris. Boards, logs, barrels, broken boats began to meet. On the shore, on the right side, a discarded kungas lay on its side. All this indicated that a great tragedy had indeed occurred here.

At 10:15, the Halibut dropped anchor in front of the destroyed Aleut base. Soon a man appeared on the shore. It was the head of the base, Druzhinin, who came running. When the fishermen on the boat moved ashore, he told them about everything that had happened the previous night. All the buildings at the base were washed away into the bay, only wooden posts dug along the perimeter remained from the warehouses. Seven children died, including six children of Druzhinin himself. He and his wife miraculously escaped. Now they only have a daughter who lived in a boarding school in the village of Zhupanovo.

Druzhinin led the fishermen to a hill, where they spent the past night, warming themselves by the fire, under the open sky, the survivors of the base. There were six of them left: Druzhinin with his wife Anna, workers Gradarev and Beloshitsky and Usova with their little son. Beloshitsky, immediately after the incident, went on foot to the Shipunsky meteorological post in order to report from there by radio about the tragedy. The rest all this time looking for children. One girl was found dead, the rest were still hoped to be found.

Druzhinin and his wife were torn between their search and the need to collect the remaining property, since both were accountable persons: he was the head of the base, she was the supply manager. The arrivals looked around the shore and saw various spare parts of ships and equipment that were stored in warehouses sprinkled with snow, scattered in disorder. All this had to be collected and a complete inventory taken.

The arriving people took upon themselves all the troubles, realizing what psychological shock the inhabitants of the base had experienced. All five, frozen, almost insane, were sent aboard the ship. The body of the deceased girl was also taken there. The captain instructed the sailors to make a coffin and dig a grave. The rest were divided into three groups. Two went in different directions along the shore to look for the missing children, and the third undertook to collect the rest of the property.

In the afternoon, the bodies of all the children were found, after which Shevchuk and the captain of the "Halibut" decided to take them on board and hastily leave, as prescribed by the regional headquarters, to other points, and then to Severo-Kurilsk, but the grief-stricken Druzhinins protested, they wanted bury the children on the island.

"Halibut" was allowed to stay in Morzhovaya Bay and do everything that people ask. They also gave the command not to beat the cows, but to try to pick them up.

During the day, strong tremors were felt on the shore. At night they again repeated. The verse didn't fade...

The festive day of November 7 did not please anyone. It was the day of the children's funeral. And so far, according to people who have been on the deserted shore of Bolshaya Morzhovaya Bay, one can see mass grave, in which the innocent victims of the tsunami are buried - 6 small children of the Druzhinins and the son of Gradarev.

Many casualties and great destruction in the bays of Bolshaya Zhirovaya and Malaya Zhirovaya became known on the afternoon of November 5 from a radio message from Major Klimovich of the Border Troops. In the evening, the Sannikov tugboat and refrigerator No. 173 were sent there. The expedition was headed by the deputy chairman of the Kamchatka Regional Executive Committee Yagodinets. The senior assistant Nikolay Ivanovich Lutsai acted as the captain on the Sannikov tugboat.

In Malaya Zhirovaya there was a fish factory No. 3 and the base of the Avachinsky fish processing plant. The wave here washed away all industrial buildings and residential buildings. There were many victims. The plant was headed by Ivan Trofimovich Kovtun. His two-year-old daughter died, the body was not found. The well-known Kamchatka ichthyologist Innokenty Alexandrovich Polutov in his book "A long time ago" told this story like this: "Kovtun and his wife somehow escaped; the girl they were leading was torn out of their hands by a wave ...".

By the way, at the Kamchatka branch of TINRO in Zhirovaya Bay there was a summer house - an observation post. It was built just in 1952. He was swept out to sea by a tsunami wave along with a watchman. Unfortunately, Polutov does not give the watchman's name; he is also not on the official list of the dead.

Tragically, the fate of the majority of the inhabitants of Malaya Zhirovaya. The Dyachenko and Podshibyakin families perished entirely. From the Gimadeev family, a father and two sons were in Yagodnaya Bay, without them their entire family perished - a mother and three daughters.

In Bolshaya Zhirovaya there was the village of Novaya Tarya, in which the workers of plant No. 3 and the Kirov collective farm lived. Here, too, all buildings were destroyed and washed away. 46 people were saved, 81 died, but only 29 bodies were found.

The rescue expedition worked in difficult weather conditions - it was snowing, the wind was strong. The bodies found were loaded onto a refrigerator to be taken to the central village of the Avachinsky fish factory - Tarya, and buried there. It made no sense to bury on the spot, since there was practically no one to live in the bays.

In the bay of Malaya Zhirovaya, sailors found a fish factory safe with a large amount of money - 69 thousand 269 rubles, loaded it onto the Sannikov and delivered it to the city. They also found a wounded border guard on the shore, who was brought to the surviving outpost in Malaya Zhirovaya.

As mentioned above, in the village of Nalychevo there was a branch of the fishing artel named after. Lenin, whose central estate was in Khalaktyrka. 39 people lived in Nalychevo together with their children. The first wave of the tsunami destroyed the village, killing four children and one old pensioner. The rest of the residents fled to the nearest border outpost, where they were sheltered and from where they were informed by radio to Petropavlovsk about the tragedy.

After they learned about the incident in Petropavlovsk, sappers with pontoons were sent to the place. However, when the soldiers approached the village, the water had already subsided, leaving behind a real swamp through which cars could not pass. They also could not get close to the outpost, since it was separated from the road by three huge gullies. Then it was decided to evacuate people from the sea. Landing barge No. 104 was sent to the outpost under the command of Senior Lieutenant Zuev. Together with the crew, the commander of the landing ship division, Captain 2nd Rank Pivin, and the secretary of the party collegium at the Kamchatka Regional Committee of the CPSU, M. L. Artemenko, went to Nalychevo.

Around 9 pm on November 6, the barge stood in front of the border outpost. A memorandum by M. L. Artemenko about this operation has been preserved:

"... They did not know the area and approaches, but, having discovered the border post of Cape Nalychev, they decided to contact the shore and establish exactly the situation and where the people were. An attempt to find out from the border guards who came ashore to us for communication was unsuccessful, since the noise of a strong the surf of the sea, the wind and the long distance to the coast, did not allow the voice to accurately establish the situation.

Then we, that is, I and comrades Pivin and Zuev, decided that it was necessary to go from ship to shore for communication. But at night it is risky to do this with a boat in such a surf, it is better to jump straight from the gangway in rubber suits. Lieutenant N. S. Kuznetsov, assistant commander of the ship, was appointed for this, and in order to have a complete idea, I also went with him.

Comrade Kuznetsov, risking, was the first to jump into the sea with a rope, reached the shore and, together with the border guards, pulled the rope. I, freely holding on to her, also walked to the shore. Having established the whole situation and exactly where the people were and how the approaches were, we tried to return to the ship, but the intensifying storm and snowfall did not allow us to do this. Decided to wait until morning.

On the morning of November 7, we boarded the ship, having described the situation to the commander of the ship, we went to the place where the people were. We approached the shore at a distance of 50-60 meters. They could not come closer, because there was a large shallow and a large wave roll. They decided to dress the sailors in rubber overalls, pull the rope ashore and, throwing out the gangway, first transfer all the children in their arms to the ship, and deliver the adults by boat. So they did.

The whole operation went well. People were placed in a well-heated cockpit, having organized tea for them first, then lunch and dinner.

Captain Comrade Zuev did not leave the bridge all the time, he himself commanded the ship back and forth. 6 sailors worked perfectly: four who carried the guys from the shore to the ship on the freezing water, and two who transported adults.

The whole team lovingly greeted the victims, especially the children. While the parents were taken on board, the sailors had already warmed up and given tea to the children.

Later, in the memorandum of the Secretary of the Kamchatka Regional Committee of the CPSU, V.I. Alekseev, to the Secretary of the Khabarovsk Regional Committee of the CPSU, A.P. Efimov, there is a place for two people who participated in the rescue of the inhabitants of Nalychevo. The note says: “We ask you to especially note the work of comrades: Eliseev, the head of the outpost in the village of Nalychevo, who received 32 people fleeing the flood, provided them with food, clothes, shoes at the expense of the outpost and kept them at the outpost for three days; Zuev, the captain ship of the military flotilla DK-104, which ensured the removal of 32 people from the village of Nalychevo in difficult conditions.

In turn, Senior Lieutenant Zuev filed a report to encourage his subordinates, thanks to which we know who exactly participated in that heroic operation.

"List of personnel of military unit 90361-a, who distinguished themselves in providing assistance to the population of the village of Nalychevo 7. 11.1952.:

1. Lieutenant Kuznetsov N. S.

2. Petty officer 1 article Bondarev P. N.

3. Petty Officer 1 article Lebedinsky L.K.

4. Senior sailor Franoff V.I.

5. Senior sailor Smirnov V.A.

6. Sailor Burdin Vs. I.

7. Sailor Naumenko A.I.

8. Sailor Korobov N.I.

9. Senior sailor Soloviev N.F.

After performing rescue operations, DK-104 arrived in Petropavlovsk, where all the Nalychevites were handed over to doctors.

The holiday came no matter what. The authorities of the city were simply obliged to hold it in full order, according to the well-established Soviet tradition - with a demonstration of workers, a parade, a rally, speeches, colorful balloons and posters.

On November 7, the relay race of demonstrations began from Kamchatka. At 11 o'clock in the morning - a rally. The gathered people are waving balloons and red flags, listening to the whistles of steamers in the port. There is an unloading of people arriving from the coast and islands affected by the tsunami. "Kamchatskaya Pravda" later wrote: "After the rally, a demonstration begins. Banners, slogans and posters flood the street..." The day turned out to be cold, gloomy, windy, rare snowflakes fell.

People remember how after the demonstration, throwing flags into the bodies of cars, they ran to the port to meet the victims. But the police were not allowed to the shore.

And at 0005 hours, that is, at night after the holiday, the city was again shaken by tremors. The element did not subside. True, this time there was no destruction or tsunami.

Back in 1935, academician-geologist Alexander Nikolaevich Zavaritsky organized a volcanological station in the village of Klyuchi, at the foot of the Klyuchevskoy volcano in Kamchatka. It was a small white house with a modest set of special appliances. The baton of Zavaritsky in the study of volcanoes was picked up by Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences Boris Ivanovich Piip. All the days described here he was at the seismic station together with the researcher Vera Petrovna Enman.

Alas, the first shocks of the earthquake on the night of November 5 in Klyuchi, as well as at the Petropavlovsk station, were not recorded by instruments. Literally before that, Piip dismantled them for preventive maintenance, but there were simply no others. According to his feelings, he determined the strength of concussions in the Keys at 5 points according to the then 12-point OST-VKS system.

"5 points - a fairly strong earthquake (26 - 50 mm / sec. sq.); on the street and in general in the open air it is noted by many, even at the full height of daytime work. Inside the houses it is felt by everyone due to the general shaking of the building; the impression is like from the fall of a heavy object (bag, furniture); the swaying of chairs, beds, together with the persons on them, as in rough seas. (From the instructions).

The shocks of various strengths continued for more than a day, and on the evening of November 6, B.I.

"The earthquake noted in Klyuchi on November 5 at about 4 o'clock in the morning with a force of 5 points turned out to be the initial concussion of a swarm of earthquakes that have continued with variable strength for 30 hours (as of 10 o'clock in the morning on 6. 11. 52). Earthquakes originate along the coastal cliff of the bottom ocean along Paramushira Island to Cape Shipunsky Volcano Station, Dr. Piip, 21.10, 6.11".

Piip did not yet know about the tsunami and the disasters it caused. But he assumed that there were consequences of the earthquake. Therefore, he sent another telegram, in which he asked "to inform the consequences of the earthquake in Petropavlovsk and help to obtain information through Sidorenko (head of Glavkamchatrybprom - Auth.) about the consequences of the earthquake on the territory of the peninsula. The information is needed to clarify the seismic zoning of Kamchatka."

The next morning, November 7, Piip was informed by a large radiogram from Petropavlovsk through the district committee of the party in Ust-Kamchatsk.

After that, B. I. Piip’s radio conversations with the regional leadership became relatively regular. It transmits to the city all the received and analyzed information. Here, for example, is one of his telegrams dated November 7:

"On the status at 18:00 on November 7. The earthquake continues at intervals of 15 - 20 minutes, but the displacements of the soil become weaker. The centers have noticeably moved to the northeast, concentrating in the area of ​​Cape Shipunsky. I believe that the movements in the earth's crust are weakening, further large shaking unlikely. Your information has been received, the picture is now clear. I think you should call me, discuss the event and make an assessment to prevent it in the future. Piip."

By the way, the shocks, weakening, continued until November 12. And then the event was still discussed. Piip firmly posed the problem of creating a system of permanent observations of seismic environment in the Far East. Here is an excerpt from his note:

"Currently, there are two seismic stations in Kamchatka: one - of the Geophysical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences in the city of Petropavlovsk and the other - in the form of a seismic department at the Kamchatka Volcanological Station of the USSR Academy of Sciences in the village of Klyuchi. Both stations, created quite recently and working for a number of reasons, are completely unsatisfactory So far, they are engaged only in recording earthquakes.They do not have the results of their work, there is no way to generalize.The seismograms of these stations, as well as other stations Far East are sent for detailed processing to the seismic department of the Far Eastern Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences on Sakhalin.

In view of the fact that Kamchatka is a kind of seismic region, in which not only destructive tectonic earthquakes appear, but strong volcanic earthquakes often flare up in the form of swarms. In view of the fact that not all Kamchatka earthquakes are captured by a rare network of seismic stations in the Far East (Vladivostok, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Kurilsk and Magadan), as a result of which the position and activity of many seismotectonic zones of the peninsula are not fixed, the existence of only two seismic stations here should be considered very insufficient.

In Kamchatka and the nearest islands, it is necessary to create at least 4 more seismic stations: one on the western coast of the peninsula near the village of Icha, another in the village of Ossora in the north of Kamchatka, the third in the city of Severo-Kurilsk on Paramushir (or in the inhabited area at Cape Lopatka) and the fourth on the Commander Islands. A network of 6 stations will detect all tectonic and volcanic earthquakes in the region, determine active seismic zones and develop earthquake prediction issues. To process the materials, a center of the Kamchatka seismic service should be created in Petropavlovsk ... I believe that it is necessary to ask the government to create the named network of seismic stations in Kamchatka and a permanent seismic service, similar to those operating in the Crimea, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Having considered the note of B. I. Piip, the 1st Secretary of the Kamchatka Regional Committee of the CPSU P. N. Solovyov on November 28 prepares his memorandum to Khabarovsk, in which he specifically justifies the construction of four seismic stations in Kamchatka. The region begins the path to the creation of not only specialized volcanological and seismological services, but also to the organization of the Institute of Volcanology - the current pride of all of Russia. As they say, there is no evil without good ...

When the epic with the removal from the shore and the delivery of people to Petropavlovsk, Sakhalin and Vladivostok was generally coming to an end, it was decided to send the motor schooner "Poyarkov" of the Kamchatrybflot along the eastern coast of Kamchatka in order to once again examine all the bays, capes and stones. The fact is that sometimes the pilots received information that people were seen, or smoke in one place or another. Dim lights were also sometimes seen from ships at night. In a word, it was necessary to once again carefully examine everything.

The captain of the schooner Yevgeny Ivanovich Skavrunsky left on the evening of November 9th. On the schooner, the instructor of the fishing industry department of the regional committee of the CPSU, V. S. Brovenko, was responsible for the task.

On November 10, the expedition carefully examined the bays of Ahamten, Asacha, Mutnaya, Rukavichka, Piratkov. At this time, the captain received a radiogram, which ordered him to definitely go to Khodutka Bay and pick up prisoners in distress from there. The crew was very surprised by the fact that people they knew about had not yet been filmed. Is it really only because they are prisoners, including political ones?

And it was like that. In Khodutka Bay there was a fishing base of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where prisoners caught and processed fish for their enterprise, located in Lagernaya Bay in Avacha Bay - in the Okeansky settlement. The prisoners were led by Vladimir Vainshtein, a well-known engineer in Kamchatka, who also served time and under whose leadership, in fact, the production workshops in Okeansky were built. At that moment he led a brigade in Khodutka. Here is what his son, the famous photo artist Igor Vladimirovich Weinstein, who knew the whole story from his father, said:

"There were no fish, they did nothing, they just waited to be taken out. My father lived alone in a small house, which stood on a small hill - 2-3 meters above sea level - right on the spit that separated the bay from the estuary. From There was a small rise up the spit where there was a barrack. All the convicts lived there. There was no guard, because the father was responsible for everyone. He himself selected people into the brigade, so he was responsible for everyone. Besides, it was considered - who would run away from Kamchatka? ?

So, they had nothing to do, they sat in the upper barracks and played preference. Coincidentally, on that ill-fated night of November 5, they finished playing late at night, around 4 o'clock in the morning. Father left the barracks and went to his house. There, on the spit, he would have died first, but something seemed to stop him. He heard a roar from the sea. I took several dozen steps with a flashlight and heard this rumble. How did he guess, what instinct? But he immediately ran back to the barracks and ordered everyone to run upstairs. Run up the slope. And not in vain. The wave reached the barracks and washed it away. And of course the house too. I came later and looked. The boat, which they used as a "bug", was thrown up the river for two and a half kilometers. And there he stood. And the poor convicts then all these days sat half-naked and hungry in the open air. From the plane they threw off only a bag of flour. It's good that someone found matches ... "

It was these people who had to be removed by the Poyarkov schooner. She arrived in Khodutka Bay late in the evening of November 10, in complete darkness. We decided to act in the morning, November 11th.

With the onset of dawn, having specified the location of the ship and the shore, they lowered the boat, led by the senior assistant to the captain Alexander Iosifovich Bashkirtsev. From the shore strong wind up to 9 points, the work was not easy. However, let's go. But as soon as they moved away from the schooner, they noticed a boat going towards them. It contained the prisoner Weinstein. Both boats returned to the ship, where Weinstein outlined the situation ashore. People urgently needed to be filmed, they were starving.

V. S. Brovenko described the operation as follows: “Work on the removal of people began to be carried out only from 20 o’clock on November 11 under the spotlight. The majority of the team members expressed a desire to go out on a whaleboat voluntarily.

The removal of people took place with a 9-point wind with icing. The whaleboat went to the shore three times, the removal of people was carried out in small batches. In total, 26 people were taken from the shore, two of them were women.

Particularly distinguished in rescue work were the members of the team: captain Skavrunsky, senior assistant to the captain Bashkirtsev, senior mechanic Lazebny, 2nd mechanic Fominykh, sailor Babenko, boatswain Rudaev, minder Timoshenko, electrician Samoylenko.

The accepted people were fed and placed to rest, drying of clothes was organized.”

On the morning of November 12, the schooner continued its slow voyage along the coast of Kamchatka. She managed to save people at least two more points.

Were all the people picked up then? Through the Glavkamchatrybprom switchboard, dispatcher Mironov was informed that there were four people in a tent in the southern part of Mutnaya Bay, at a height opposite the Sea Sivuchy stone. A command was given to the minesweeper "Sever" to go to Mutnaya and check. The minesweeper checked, reported: "He passed from Cape Lopatka to Povorotny, when entering each bay he carefully examined. No people were found in Mutnaya Bay. Lighten further instructions."

But after all, someone saw people ...

LIVE AND MISSING

On November 12, the evacuation of the population affected by the tsunami ended. The islands of Paramushir and Shumshu were deserted. The survivors gradually ended up mainly in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and other cities of Sakhalin. But many of them who in a year, who in two again returned to their islands. Many were drawn to the places where their relatives remained forever. Others simply had nowhere to go. True, the destroyed settlements on the islands were not restored either, people now lived mainly in Severo-Kurilsk, which they began to rebuild in a new place.

Undoubtedly, the biggest disaster associated with the tsunami of November 5, 1952, occurred right here, on the island of Paramushir, where the victims, as mentioned above, were colossal. And what, after all, were the victims?

It is known that the Japanese, owning the Kuriles, concentrated more than 60 thousand soldiers on these islands during the Second World War. In addition, almost 20 thousand civilians lived on the islands. After the victory over Japan in August-September 1945, the Japanese population was completely removed from the Kuriles. We then got huge trophies: many beautiful defensive structures, airfields, barracks, training grounds, 11 ready-made fish processing plants, whale processing plants, villages, etc. It was simply a sin not to use all this. In addition, the USSR fortified the islands with border troops. In total, by 1952 there were more than 100 thousand people on the islands, mostly military personnel. And most of them were just here, in the northern archipelago. According to the certificate of the Administration of the Far Eastern Military District No. 32/12/3969 dated 30.11.1998, issued to the administration of the North Kuril region, on the islands of Paramushir and Shumshu, as of November 5, 1952, the following military formations were stationed:

Paramushir Island:

6th machine gun and artillery division of the Order of Lenin;

1160 separate artillery and anti-aircraft division;

communications battalion;

43rd separate engineering battalion;

224th repair shop;

9th field bakery;

73rd separate aviation communications link;

divisional automobile school;

137th separate medical and sanitary company;

veterinary clinic;

70th military post station;

counterintelligence department of the MGB.

Shumshu Island:

12th machine-gun and artillery regiment of the Order of Lenin;

50th Red Banner Machine Gun Artillery Regiment

428th Red Banner Artillery Regiment;

84th tank self-propelled regiment.

For some reason, the certificate does not say anything about the sailors, although in Baikovo, for example, there was a base for torpedo boats at that time. But even without that, it is clearly visible what a huge number of military personnel were then on these two islands. And all these people, who knew nothing about the tsunami, got into that terrible "night of the ocean." How many of them died? How many are left alive?

In total, 10.5 thousand civilians lived on two islands - Paramushir and Shumshu. The Museum of Severo-Kurilsk has the following data on civilian casualties, calculated by various researchers: adults - 6,060; children under 16 years old - 1,742; total - 7 802 people.

The military, I think, was no less, if not more. The official secret documentation of 1952 calls them "Urbanovich's people", "Gribakin's people", after the names of their commanders. These victims are unknown to us.

"The commander of the fifth flotilla has a government task to remove everyone from the Kuriles, even the border guards, leaving only his economy, the latter is not yet certain, but the population is to be removed," says a telephone message to the head of Glavkamchatrybprom A. T. Sidorenko from one of his subordinates Klishin, who is in Severo-Kurilsk. This gives reason to say that everyone was taken out then. Border guards, however, left. How much was taken out?

In the memorandum of the 1st Secretary of the Kamchatka Regional Committee of the CPSU P.N.

The steamer "Korsakov" brought 472 people;

Kashirstroy - 1,200;

Uelen - 3,152;

"Mayakovsky" - 1,200;

"Khabarovsk" - 569;

All these people were sent to Primorye or Sakhalin.

"Vychegda" - 818;

Ships of the Ministry of the Navy - 493;

Aviation - 1 509

These people were taken to Petropavlovsk.

Total: 9,413 people.

If we take into account that about 2,700 civilians survived, then the military took out 6,700 people. How many of them were on the islands? Of course, more. One must think that at least ten thousand of them died. The total number of victims in the Northern Kuriles can be taken in the amount of up to 15-17 thousand people. Although, I repeat, there are oral data about 50 thousand. It is this figure that still walks in legends in Kamchatka and the Kuriles.

On November 17, Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences B.I. Piip sailed from Petropavlovsk to the Kuriles. November 20 approached the island of Onekotan. “We disembarked quite far from the dwelling,” Piip wrote in his diary, “so we had to walk along the shore with things for a long time. They walked and looked at various things and products lying among the stones. There were shells, pickled tomatoes, potatoes, jars of canned food mixed with sea urchins and seaweed. Climbing onto the terrace, where there were 3 completely intact houses, but with open doors and complete destruction inside, we stopped here to look for the owners. There were none. It became obvious that all this was abandoned at the time of the sudden evacuation.

Having examined the islands, Piip returned to Petropavlovsk on December 1. By this time, they were able to calculate that about 200 people died in Kamchatka, but the number of missing people is unknown. “The latter is because the propiska system was poorly set up,” notes B. Piip.

WITHOUT BIG WORDS

On December 1, 1952, Stalin signed Decree No. 5029-1960 of the SS, providing for the restoration of the objects of the national economy destroyed by the tsunami. The next day, the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR issued Decree No. 1573-88 SS "On the labor and household arrangements for the population affected by the earthquake." The author has at his disposal a certificate from the chairman of the Kamchatka Regional Plan, I. Chernyak, on the implementation of this resolution as of the end of 1952. It is important to note that almost immediately the region received 200 thousand rubles for issuing loans to the victims for individual construction and 100 thousand rubles for household equipment. But no one took the money. Either there was no one, or people did not know how to do it. Or maybe they found state-owned housing and did not want to have their own private farms? In any case, the certificate says so: "Slowly used due to lack of need."

As for state-owned housing, it is true that 2 million rubles were allocated to the Kamchatka region for expenses related to the household arrangements of the population. The money was received and spent.

The All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions allocated 100 free vouchers to sanatoriums and rest homes in the Far East. At the time of writing, 40 vouchers were used.

For sale to the affected collective farms of Kamchatka, Tsentrosoyuz undertook to bring 1.4 thousand square meters of single-family panel houses, 2,000 cubic meters of round timber, 60 tons of roofing iron, 10 tons of nails and 50 boxes of glass. In December, glass, 650 cubic meters of timber, 9 panel houses came. In addition, the collective farms received 100 tons of grain fodder and 700 tons of feed.

And on January 13, 1953, I. Stalin signed the order of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 825-RS, which ordered:

"Give the authorities social security right:

1. Assign pensions to workers and employees who became disabled during the earthquake in Kamchatka and the Kuril Islands in November 1952., as well as to the families of workers and employees who lost their breadwinners during this earthquake in the amounts provided for in Articles 5, 7 and 15 of the Decree of the Federal Council for Social Insurance under the People's Commissariat of Labor of the USSR of February 29 1952. № 47.

Persons who worked at the beginning of the earthquake (November 51952.) in positions that give the right to receive an increased pension established for workers in the most important sectors of the national economy, and who became disabled during the earthquake, as well as members of their families in the event of loss of a breadwinner during this earthquake, assign increased pensions, respectively, for disability or in case of loss the breadwinner in compliance with the conditions and norms for the appointment of pensions provided for cases of industrial injury.

These pensions are to be assigned on the basis of certificates issued by the executive committees of local Soviets of Working People's Deputies to those affected by the earthquake.

2. To continue the payment of pensions to persons whose pension files were lost due to the earthquake in Kamchatka and the Kuril Islands in November 1952, according to the decisions of the commissions for the appointment of pensions under the district executive committees, after a preliminary check of the documents confirming the fact of receiving pensions: pension certificate, personal account, protocol of the commission for the appointment of pensions, marks in the passport or other documents.

In principle, if we recall the situation with compensation and housing for the victims of the earthquake in Neftegorsk in our time, then the distant, Stalinist 1952, with his decree and other measures, looks more humane in relation to people ...

If we talk about Petropavlovsk, then in 1952 only 2,820 people arrived from the coast and the Kuriles. They were placed in military units (almost 2 thousand delivered were military), in hospitals, in the surrounding villages. The needy were provided with clothes, shoes, underwear. Old-timers recall that the city lacked bread and some other essential products, there were queues in the shops. But no one grumbled, the townspeople understood that all this needed to be calmly and steadfastly endured.

True, people were greatly disturbed by rumors of a possible repeated, strong earthquake. To this, the volcanologist Svyatlovsky replied: "Such earthquakes occur very rarely. They are known from the history of earthquakes of this type in 1737 and 1868 in the region of Petropavlovsk and the Kuril Islands. They caused tsunami waves similar to those that occurred in 1952. Thus, the period between catastrophes of this type is about 100 years and a new an earthquake that forms a wave in the Kuriles, perhaps not soon."

Gradually, the fear passed. But the constant expectation of a major seismic event lives in Kamchatka and Kuriles all the time, it is in the subconscious. And there is no getting away from it. But you have to live. And one must be able to unite, at the call of conscience, at the same time endure common hardships and misfortunes. How, without big words, thousands of our compatriots, residents of Kamchatka and the Kuriles, managed then - on the Night of the Ocean.

According to the volcanologist B. Piip, the maximum wave height in15 m. was observed in the very north of the coast of Kamchatka affected by the tsunami - Olga Bay.

Alexander Smyshlyaev

This is the last earthquake of the five most powerful on Earth, an article about which has not yet been published. Why wasn't there? Because it is the earliest? Not at all. Because it's not the most interesting? No, since it would be very funny for a person who was born in the USSR and lived in a seismically dangerous area not to know about him and not be interested in what is happening in his practically native country.
And here's why: little is known about the earthquakes that occurred on the territory of the USSR, except perhaps from foreign sources. They knew that there were earthquakes, but the details were usually not covered.
Let's start:
November 4, 1952 at 16:52 local time, a strong earthquake occurred off the eastern coast of Kamchatka. The earthquake was followed by a massive tsunami that resulted in economic losses of about $1 million in 1952 prices. The magnitude of the earthquake was originally estimated at 8.2, but in 1977 Hiro Kanamori recalculated it, and as a result, the magnitude of the earthquake was 9.0 magnitude. The depth of the hypocenter was about 30 kilometers.
The tsunami caused enormous damage in the Hawaiian Islands. midway atoll was flooded, the water level rose by 1 meter. In the Hawaiian Islands, waves destroyed boats, telephone lines, moorings were destroyed, beaches were washed away, lawns were flooded. In Honolulu, the Harbor barge was dropped onto another freighter. In Hilo, the tsunami destroyed a small bridge. Wave heights of up to 9.1 meters have been recorded at Cape Kayena on Oahu. The north coast of Oahu had most of the destruction in Hawaii. In Hilo, a boathouse was demolished at a cost of about $13,000. One span of a bridge in the Cocos Islands was destroyed. In Hilo alone, damage is estimated at $400,000. However, in other coastal cities in Hawaii, the rise in water was barely noticeable.

In Alaska, a strong tsunami was also observed. In Masskru Bay, the wave had a height of 2.7 meters and a period of about 17 minutes. Low-lying areas were flooded. In Adak, the wave height was less - about 1 meter - and only the shores in the harbor area were flooded. Schools were closed in Dutch Harbor and people were evacuated to higher ground, but the wave did not cause damage, since its height was small, only half a meter. In other places, the height of the tsunami waves was even less - within 30 centimeters.
In California, the maximum tsunami waves were observed in Avila - 1.4 meters high, in Crescent - 1 meter, and in other cities and towns howled less than a meter and did not cause noticeable damage.
In New Zealand the waves reached a height of 1m. A tsunami was also observed in Japan, but there is no information about the damage from it and the loss of life. Minor wave damage has even been reported in Peru and Chile, more than 9,000 kilometers away from the quake.

In Kamchatka, wave heights ranged from 0 to 5 meters, but in some places the tsunamis were higher (from Kronotsky Peninsula to Cape Shipursky - from 4 to 13 meters). The most high wave was observed in Olga Bay and was 13 meters high and there it caused significant damage. The time during which the waves reached Cape Olga was 42 minutes after the earthquake. From Cape Shipursky to Cape Povorotny, the height of the tsunami wave ranged from 1 to 10 meters and caused significant human casualties and economic losses. IN Avacha bay the tsunami was only about 1.2 meters high and arrived there half an hour after the earthquake. From Cape Povorotny to Cape Lopatka, the wave height was from 5 to 15 meters. In Khodutka Bay, the boat was thrown to a distance of 500 meters from the coastline. On the western coast of Kamchatka, the maximum tsunami height was recorded in Ozerny and was 5 meters. On Alaid Island in the ridge of the Kuril Islands, the wave height was 1.5 meters, on Shumshu Island - from 7 to 9 meters, on Paramushir - from 4 to 18.4 meters. In Severo-Kurilsk, the main city of the Kuril Islands, located on Paramushir, the wave height was very high - about 15 meters. The tsunami caused great destruction in the city and led to significant loss of life. On the island of Onekotan, the wave height was 9 meters, on the island of Shiashkoton - 8 meters, on the island of Iturup - 2.5 meters. Waves up to 2 meters high were recorded on the Commander Islands and Okhotsk. On Sakhalin in the city of Korsakov, the wave height was about 1 meter.
According to the latest estimates, the total number of victims was about four thousand people, most of which were in the Kuril Islands.

Many destroyed settlements and frontier outposts have never been restored. The population of the islands has been greatly reduced. Severo-Kurilsk was rebuilt, moved away from the ocean, as far as the terrain allowed. As a result, he ended up in an even more dangerous place - on the mudflow cone of the Ebeko volcano, one of the most active in the Kuriles. The population of the city today is about 3 thousand people. The catastrophe initiated the creation of a tsunami warning service in the USSR, which is now in a sad state due to beggarly funding.
HISTORY Three earthquakes that occurred off the coast of Kamchatka in 1737, 1923 and 1952 were caused by the collision of the Pacific and Okhotsk plates. Northern Kamchatka is located in the western part of the Bering Fault between the Pacific and North American plates. Many earthquakes occur in this area, the last of which was recorded in 1997.
The earthquake of 1737 had a magnitude slightly less than 9.0 according to the latest calculation, the source was at a depth of 40 kilometers. The earthquake on February 4, 1923 had a magnitude of 8.3-8.5 and led to a tsunami that caused significant damage in Kamchatka and human casualties. The tsunami was about 6 meters high when it reached the Hawaiian Islands, causing the death of at least one person. In addition, strong earthquakes occurred in Kamchatka on April 15, 1791 (magnitude about 7), 1807, 1809, 1810, 1821, 1827 (magnitude 6-7), May 8, 1841 (magnitude about 7), in 1851, 1902, 1904, 1911, April 14, 1923, autumn 1931, September 1936.
From the end of the 19th century to the end of the 70s of the 20th century, 56 earthquakes with a magnitude of more than 7, nine with a magnitude of more than 8 and two with a magnitude of more than 8.5 occurred in Kamchatka. Since 1969, five earthquakes with a magnitude of more than 7.5 have been recorded on the peninsula (November 22, 1969 - 7.7, December 15, 1971 - 7.8, February 28, 1973 - 7.5, December 12, 1984 - 7, 5, 5 December 1997 - 7.9).

List of earthquakes for 1952 (magnitude above 7

There are 23 volcanoes on Paramushir Island, five of them are active. Ebeko, located seven kilometers from the city, comes to life from time to time and releases volcanic gases.

In calm weather and with a westerly wind, they reach Severo-Kurilsk - the smell of hydrogen sulfide and chlorine is impossible not to feel. Usually in such cases, the Sakhalin Hydrometeorological Center transmits a storm warning about air pollution: it is easy to get poisoned by toxic gases. Eruptions in Paramushir in 1859 and 1934 caused mass poisoning of people and the death of domestic animals. Therefore, in such cases, volcanologists urge city residents to use masks to protect their breath and filters for water purification.

The site for the construction of Severo-Kurilsk was chosen without a volcanological examination. Then, in the 1950s, the main thing was to build a city no lower than 30 meters above sea level.

But in the fall of 1952, the eastern coast of Kamchatka, the islands of Paramushir and Shumshu were on the first line of the elements. The North Kuril tsunami of 1952 became one of the five largest in the history of the twentieth century.

The city of Severo-Kurilsk was destroyed. The Kuril and Kamchatka settlements of Utyosny, Levashovo, Reef, Rocky, Coastal, Galkino, Okeansky, Podgorny, Major Van, Shelekhovo, Savushkino, Kozyrevsky, Babushkino, Baikovo were swept away ...

The population of Severo-Kurilsk before the tragedy was about six thousand people. In Paramushir, on the night of November 4-5, the population was awakened by an earthquake. Furnaces collapsed; dishes and other household utensils fell off the shelves; water splashed out of buckets. Frightened people ran out of their houses. After the tremors stopped, which lasted several minutes, most of the population began to return to their homes. However, some drew attention to the fact that the sea receded from the rocky coast at a distance of about 0.5 km. Those who were previously familiar with the tsunami, mainly fishermen, rushed to the mountains, despite the calm sea.

Hearth underwater earthquakes was relatively close (within the Kuril-Kamchatka deep-water trench). In the Pacific Ocean, 200 kilometers southeast of Petropavlovsk, a sea wave surged above the epicenter of the earthquake. Accelerating her run and strength, rising higher and higher, she rushed to the shores of Kamchatka and the Kuril Islands. After 40 minutes of running, it grew to eight meters and overwhelmed the land. The lowlands and estuarine parts of the river valleys were flooded. She had highest altitude in the central part of the city, where it rolled along the river valley. A few minutes later, the wave receded into the sea. Having torn off the earth from the rocks along with trees and shrubs, carrying rich prey into the ocean. She licked the outfits of border guards walking along the edge of the coast, watchtowers, boats, boats and kungas, wooden buildings. The bottom of the strait was exposed for several hundred meters. Calm has come.

After 15-20 min. a second, even larger wave, 10 meters high, hit the city. She caused especially severe destruction, washing away all the buildings. Behind the wave, only the cement foundations of houses remained in place. After passing through the city, the wave reached the slopes of the mountains, after which it began to roll back into the basin, located closer to the city center. A huge whirlpool formed here, in which fragments of buildings and small vessels rotated at high speed. Rolling back, the wave hit from the rear into the coastal rampart in front of the port area, on which several houses were preserved, and bypassing the mountain broke into the Kuril Strait. On the bridge between this island and the mountain, the wave piled up a pile of logs, boxes, and even brought two houses from the city.

A few minutes after the second wave, a weaker, third wave arrived, which washed a lot of debris ashore.

And the country lived a normal life. Not a single line about the tragedy got into the Soviet press: the streets were dressed with kumach, the Soviet people enthusiastically met the 35th anniversary of the Great October Revolution! What is it here North Kuril tsunami! The number of his victims is still unknown, according to official figures, 2336 people died in Severo-Kurilsk alone. And in the museum of the city there are data from independent studies: adults - 6060, children under 16 years old - 1742; total - 7802 people. But these are only victims among the civilian population, but there were also military men, prisoners (and these, in general, no one considered), so we can talk about 13-17 thousand dead

After catastrophes on the site of the city of Severo-Kurilsk, an almost empty area of ​​\u200b\u200bseveral square kilometers formed. Only separate foundations of buildings demolished by the wave, roofs of houses thrown out of the strait, the central gate of the former stadium and a lonely standing monument to the soldiers of the Soviet army remind of the existence of the city here.

In the village of Utesny, all production facilities and buildings were completely destroyed and demolished into the ocean. Only one residential building and a stable remained ...

With the onset of dawn, reconnaissance aircraft from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky appeared over the islands and photographed the area. Airplanes dropped warm clothes, blankets, tents and food for the population, who were escaping around the fires. Then a significant part of the population was evacuated to Sakhalin.

Bay of Severo-Kurilsk today

Many destroyed settlements and frontier outposts have never been restored. The population of the islands has been greatly reduced. Severo-Kurilsk was rebuilt, moved away from the ocean, as far as the terrain allowed. As a result, he ended up in an even more dangerous place - on the mudflow cone of the Ebeko volcano, one of the most active in the Kuriles. The population of the city today is about 3 thousand people. Catastrophe initiated the creation of USSR warning service tsunami, which is now in a sad state due to beggarly funding. Against this background, the statements of the Russian authorities look ridiculous that, having such a service, we are insured against a catastrophe like 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia .

The program is "High-profile case - Tsunami classified as Secret". The truth about the tsunami in Severo-Kurilsk - November 5, 1952.