Stalin remained in Narym for only two months of his planned three years, before he escaped in 1912. Once he came to power, he himself ironically sent thousands of prisoners to the Narym gulag. According to the historian Zubareva, between 1935 and 1939 approximately 200,000 people were sent to Narym alone. In the beginning of the 1950s Narym saw a second major influx of Soviet exiles, after the end of World War II. Between 1930 and 1989. more than 500,000 people were banished to Narym and its surroundings. Under Stalin's rule, a portion of these prisoners were placed in labor camps, while the rest were simply executed. The executed were secretly thrown into mass graves by the river to the south of Narym, but because of riverbank erosion, after moving the NKVD building, masses of skeletons surfaced above the ground. The local population, of which many had family members who had been executed, who had resisted themselves against collectivization and faced the ensuing repression, were able to identify approximately 1,000 of the executed by the clothing on their remains. The Soviet authorities transported the rest of the skeletons in boats to the river falls, in order to further conceal the mass execution.