On the official Day in Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression, up to fifty people gathered outside Severodvinsk to commemorate those who worked and died in the Yagrinlag camp complex, building what is now the second largest city in the Arkhangelsk Region.
On 31 July 1937 NKVD head Yezhov’s Secret Order 00447 (“the Kulak operation”) allocated the Karelian troika a quota of 300 to be shot and 700 sent to the camps. This marked the beginning of the Great Terror.
By the end of the Terror in November 1938 at least 10,779 people had been shot and buried in Karelia. (This total does not include the 1,111 prisoners from Solovki, shot at Sandarmokh between 27 October and 4 November 1937.) A further 1,410 were sent to the camps.
Continue readingAt present there is a lull in the judicial proceedings. His lawyer Victor Anufriev says that the case files for both of Dmitriev’s trials remain in Moscow with the Supreme Court.
On 19 October Anufriev challenged the decision of the Court not to examine the appeal he submitted on his client’s behalf in June this year. His challenge was sent to Vyacheslav Lebedev, chairman of the Supreme Court, and as a result the hearings in Petrozavodsk will not resume at least until 19 November.
“This would be the third time the Petrozavodsk City Court has issued a verdict,” commented Anufriev. “He has already been acquitted twice on these charges [making pornographic photos]. These days, especially, to acquit someone twice, to release him and then return the case for re-examination is unprecedented.”
Continue readingToday Dmitriev’s friends are in Oslo to receive the Sakharov Freedom Award on his behalf. They will read out a speech written by the prize-winner who remains in custody in Karelia.
Meanwhile, the third trial of the historian at the Petrozavodsk City Court has been halted at least until 19 November while the Supreme Court considers the objection raised by his lawyer to the refusal to consider the appeal submitted in June.
Anna Yarovaya, Sever real, 29 October 2021
More than one thousand prisoners were shipped from the island prison of Solovki in October 1937.
For their relatives they disappeared even earlier when letters remained unanswered, but they were not forgotten. Their families tried to discover their fate. Many years would pass before it was learned that they had been shot.
For decades, relatives were fobbed off with lies and phoney certificates: the prisoners were sentenced to “ten years without the right to correspondence”; they were being “held in distant camps”; they had “died from a heart attack, from pneumonia.” In the late 1980s truthful information about their deaths finally emerged: when they were sentenced and shot – but not where they were executed and buried.
*
Their departure from Solovki was remembered and recorded.
Continue reading
The Dmitriev Affair 