On 4 September, Karelian historian Sergei Verigin and spokesmen for the Russian Military-Historical Society held a press conference about their recent excavations at Sandarmokh.
Their words were widely reported by the official RIA Novosti / Russia Today news agency — but only in Russian. The usual simultaneous publication in English and other languages was, for some reason, lacking.
YURY DMITRIEV has been arrested less than two weeks after a court ordered his retrial on gravely flawed charges, reports Halya Coynash. He was stopped by police in Karelia after leaving Petrozavodsk to visit the grave of a friend who died just before his first arrest.
Continue readingOn 22 April, the Karelian edition of the Rossiya TV Channel’s “Events of the Week” programme included a brief item, mentioning that “this summer” there would be fresh investigations of the burials at the Sandarmokh memorial complex near Medvezhegorsk.
(For those who know Russian,
the item begins five minutes into this half-hour broadcast)
Periodically, the suggestion that YURY DMITRIEV may have misidentified those buried at Sandarmokh or, rather, that the dead there also include Soviet prisoners of war captured and executed by the Finns in 1941-1944, has been given coverage in State-controlled Russian media and, even, in certain Finnish media outlets. Continue reading
After her journey from Moscow to Petrozavodsk to express her support for Yury Dmitriev, the redoutable literary specialist MARIETTA CHUDAKOVA found time to give a public lecture on Memory, history textbooks and how “the present generation of idiots” in Russia was raising the next …
She also responded to questions from the media, as is now the custom, in the courthouse corridor. Karelia’s State Radio & Televion Company did not include her words, however, in that evening’s news broadcast.
in Russian (English summary
or translation available presently)
“As Russia marks the centenary of the October Revolution, President Vladimir Putin has urged the society to end discord over the Soviet era,” reported the TASS news agency[1] on 21 December 2017.
“This year, the centenary of the October Revolution, we have been seeking to encourage the society to abandon confrontation, to see themselves as a single society and realize that we are continuing our common centuries-long history,” Putin told a session of the Council for Culture and Art.
“Whether we like certain years or not, but there was everything there – bad things, but also a lot of good things that should not be forgotten,” he said.
Johnson’s Russia List
2017-#239, Friday, 22 December 2017, Item 1 (Excerpt)
Nikita Petrov (Memorial)
Every spring, buses covered in portraits of Joseph Stalin appear on the streets of Russian cities. His face replaces ads for cell phones, soft drinks, laundry detergent, and cat food. With each passing year, the dictator gets more handsome and more glamorous; a portrait of him in his gorgeous white generalissimo’s jacket has become especially popular. He casts his stern gaze on the citizens, as if to say, “Remember me? I’m here, I didn’t go anywhere – and don’t you forget it!”
Continue reading
The Dmitriev Affair 