On August 21, 1929, the OGPU expedition arrived at its destination at the mouth of Chibyu Creek, where the Chibyu production field of the former Neft Partnership had previously been located, and where the production field of the Arkhangelsk Regional Economic Council had been located in 1920–21. All the buildings at the former field had been boarded up and sealed by the Izhemsk Local Economic Council. A cursory inspection revealed a steam engine, two boring and drilling machines, a kerosene refinery taken from the field of the engineer Gansberg, and other equipment. Expedition member Aleksandr Kulevsky recalled the trip in his memoirs: “We arrived in Chibyu during the day and my heart sank at the sight of the wild and bleak picture we saw. A black, ridiculously oversized single tower and two miserable huts surrounded by nothing but taiga and swamps.”
The crew, already exhausted from the difficult trip, faced an enormous amount of work. Fifteen barges had to be unloaded immediately and the remaining structures needed major repairs. Meanwhile, barracks, a sauna, a bakery and several other facilities had to be built in order to somehow accommodate the crew.
Bad weather and the approaching fall drove the prisoners to complete work as quickly as possible. On the second day after arriving, they were split up into different work areas and a 12-hour workday was established. They began repairing the surviving facilities, installing equipment, and logging.
A second group of 50 prisoners, including 20 specialists, arrived via the same route along the Izhma River in October 1929. Two of these specialists were the well-known geologist Nikolay Tikhonovich, who later took over the camp’s geologic service, and Ilya Ginsburg, a specialist in geology and mineralogy who was to handle the extraction of radioactive water from the Ukhta field. Mining engineers also arrived, including Pëtr Antonov, Konstantin Erdely, Zinovy Khurgin, Andrey Voloshanovsky, and Ivan Kosolapkin, the drilling expert from Grozny.
Also arriving with this group were OGPU officials who would later go on to become the core of the Ukhta-Pechora camp: Yakov Moroz, G. Ivanov, V. Gauk, and others.
The final structural touch was put on the expedition in late October and early November 1929 when, on November 2, Chekist Yakov Moroz (Iosema) (1898–1938) was appointed head of the expedition with special authority.
The expedition members went to work with a minimal amount of equipment and a small work force. During the initial stage, the geologists were asked to determine the actual probability of extracting commercial crude. Their attention was first drawn to the presence of oil shows and the likelihood of its commercial extraction. They determined that the well drilled by the Neft Association in 1917 had produced a slight oil flow after being repaired. This, combined with oil flows at other wells, enabled the expedition to produce the first five tons of oil in the region over a four-month period in 1929.
Geologist Nikolay Tikhonovich (1872–1952) determined the best area to drill new exploratory Well 5, and the well was sunk and construction began in late November 1929. However, the winter of 1929–1930 was especially harsh, creating serious difficulties for the expedition, and the transition from preliminary excavation to drilling was not made until April 4, 1930, and it was not until October 25, at a depth of 1,270–1,275 feet, that light crude began to flow out at a rate of more than 4 tons per hour. The Chibyu industrial field of Devonian oil had been opened and the first major success of the OGPU’s Ukhta Expedition had been recorded.
In April 1930, the Pechora Group was formed as a part of the Ukhta Expedition to perform further geologic work. It was comprised of Nikolay Zhigalovsky, the head of the group; Konstantin Voynovsky-Kriger, the head of operations; Semën Zhemchuzhin, the topographer; Andrey Dukhovsky, the collector; and seven workers. On April 8, the group set off on horseback and on foot for a month-long trip to the village of Medvezhskaya, where a farmer named Loginov had discovered oil shows near the Little Kozhva River.
Once the ice began to melt in Pechora in late May, the group was able to travel to the prospective area, which was 50 miles from the mouth of the river. The low levels of surface oil shows they found there were not sufficient to confirm the presence of a large oil field. The Pechora Group nevertheless decided to focus on the Ydzhid-Kyrt region, where a coal deposit was discovered.
In addition to performing a large amount of construction work, the prisoners were also hurriedly building oil derricks. Whereas only two derricks were built in 1929, ten were erected in 1930. Atotal of 4,167 feet of hole were drilled in 1930, compared to only 768 feet in 1929. Significant progress was also seen in 1930 in the extraction and processing of Devonian crude. Some 97 tons were extracted that year, with 49 tons refined and 12 tons of kerosene produced. The expedition also discovered large coal reserves while recovering radium from Ukhta field formation water. A road was built connecting the Ukhta oil-bearing area with other parts of the country, and a real opportunity emerged to create an industrial base for the Komi Autonomous Region.
The size of the expedition increased significantly in late 1930, reaching 824 people by the end of the year. Of this number, 445 individuals were working outside the main Chibyu base, while the rest were working at internal facilities.
The main outcome of the OGPU’s Ukhta Expedition in 1929–30 was the creation of a solid foundation to subsequently increase production of crude reserves, coal and other subsurface resources discovered by the expedition. Camp leadership highly praised the significant results the expedition had achieved. Lazar Kogan (1889–1939), head of the Main Administration of Prison Camps [GULAG], expressed gratitude to the head of the Ukhta exhibition, Yakov Moroz, and the entire management group for the “exceptional energy and perseverance they displayed in performing difficult assignments of special national importance.” The archives do not indicate how the OGPU rewarded the prisoners whose heavy labor made it possible to achieve these results.
Soviet political leadership viewed Kogan’s report on the success in the Timan-Pechora region as confirmation of their strategy. A special commission led by Valery Mezhlauk (1893–1938), the deputy chairman of the VSNKh, was set up as part of the Labor and Defense Council in 1931. This commission held several meetings in April 1931 that were attended by representatives of the OGPU, Soyuzneft, the Main Geologic Exploration Administration, the People’s Commissariat for Water Transportation, the Northern Territory, and the Komi Autonomous Region. In a resolution dated April 18, 1931, “On Ukhta Petroleum,” the commission decided “to allocate five percussion drilling units; approve a program for the drilling of 17,185 meters [56,381 feet] of exploratory wells in various parts of Ukhta, Verkhne-Izhma, and Pechora in 1931–32; send a gravimetric group from the Main Geologic Exploration Administration to work in the Ukhta-Pechora region in summer 1931; and allocate an additional 2.56 million rubles for 1931 from the reserve of the USSR CPC in addition to the 1.2 million rubles previously allocated.”