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 … Continue reading The Great Terror in Karelia
Background
essential reading (charges, defence, timeline, etc)
Destination unknown
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 … Continue reading Destination unknown
Sandarmokh, 5 August 2021
Today an extraordinary resource, "Russia's Necropolis of Terror and the Gulag", compiled by Petersburg Memorial's Research & Information Centre (and released in 2016), has been launched in an English version. What follows is an excerpt from that website's account of Sandarmokh. ============ [...] Historians believe that a considerable proportion of those executed in Karelia were … Continue reading Sandarmokh, 5 August 2021
Russia lodges surreal claim against Ukraine in Strasbourg
DMITRIEV's recent problems can be traced back to 5 August 2014 when he denounced the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of east Ukraine at Sandarmokh during the annual Day of Remembrance. This spring, over five years after since his arrest in mid-December 2016, lawyers from Memorial submitted an appeal on his behalf to the … Continue reading Russia lodges surreal claim against Ukraine in Strasbourg
Remembrance (3): Four brothers
Alexander Pokrovsky and his three brothers were born in a village in what today is Russia's Oryol Region. By the early 1930s, they had moved to Moscow. Ivan (1904-1933), Simeon (b. 1911), and Sergei (b. 1915) There in summer 1932 the OGPU (predecessor of the NKVD) arrested them and by October that year all four … Continue reading Remembrance (3): Four brothers
The Dmitriev Affair 