"They made a road to Koirankangas from Rzhevka. From our hill we could see clearly: a vehicle went there and then it stopped. A minute passed, perhaps, and then shots were heard. We avoided going that way. Everyone knew they were shooting people there. Murdered people were found there." Anni Arikainen (b. 1918), Kuivozi, Vsevolozhsky … Continue reading A place of execution
executions*
“Time may pass – the memory remains”
One of the last interviews Sergei KOLTYRIN, the arrested director of the Medvezhegorsk district museum, gave was to Nastoyashchee vremya, the online TV channel: https://www.currenttime.tv/a/29525989.html (Excerpts from a longer text on the website) "The death of a person’s reputation is perhaps worse than being actually murdered. After such allegations, the person carries on but with … Continue reading “Time may pass – the memory remains”
Memory Wars?
A lengthy article about the POW execution theory in Russia’s Kommersant newspaper (7 September 2018) is even-handed and thorough. It needs little more than the following passage, however, to show the "new hypothesis of Karelian historians" for what it is: “Officially, there is no data to show that the Finns carried out mass executions at … Continue reading Memory Wars?
“They were in a great hurry”: The Russian Military-Historical Society presents its findings
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 … Continue reading “They were in a great hurry”: The Russian Military-Historical Society presents its findings
Politically-motivated excavations
Russia has turned to politically-motivated excavations to rewrite the history of the USSR in the late 1930s, writes Halya Coynash, after jailing a major historian of Stalin's Great Terror yet again. A new attempt to rewrite the history of the Great Terror in the Soviet Union appears to be under way in Russia. This renewed … Continue reading Politically-motivated excavations
The Dmitriev Affair 