In February 2021 after a visit to Petrozavodsk reporters eagerly repeated [Postscript] a suggestion of DMITRIEV’s 88-year-old acquaintance Alexander Selyutsky that the historian might have upset a local relative or descendant of the “Judges” or Executioners of 1937-1938:

“He not only came across those who were arrested: the executioners were also named in those documents.”

Krasny Bor (September 2012)

Yet, as noted before, the troika members and 47 others who signed execution reports from a dozen sites across Karelia were all publicly named in the 1990s by Dmitriev’s mentor Ivan Chukhin. It was the first time such information was published anywhere in Russia,[R] notes Sergei Krivenko of Memorial.

In his 1999 book, for instance, Chukhin named 16 men who took part in executing 3,778 “near Petrozavodsk” between 9 August 1937 and 22 October 1938 (not just at Krasny Bor, perhaps, but at other still unidentified locations). And he described (Karelia in 1937, [R] p. 119) the three most often in charge of such operations : Travin, NKVD commandant for the Karelian capital; Pushkin, head of the city fire brigade; and Voronkov, seconded from the special section of the NKVD’s 17th rifle division in the Leningrad Region.

Continue reading →