On 21 October 2023 it was reported that a memorial to “the victims of Soviet repression” had been demolished in Vladimir. Yet it was not the city’s only memorial of the kind. In 2021, a gathering led by the local Memorial Society and supported by city authorities was held on the Day of Remembrance for … Continue reading On another front (2023)
FLIGE, Irina*
WHY DMITRIEV? (1)
In 2002, five years after the tragic death of Ivan Chukhin, Yury DMITRIEV published the Commemorative Lists of Karelia. This Book of Remembrance named 14,308 individuals -- most of them shot (11,275); others sent to the Gulag (1,958). The task on which Chukhin and Dmitriev had embarked almost a decade earlier was completed. Why we … Continue reading WHY DMITRIEV? (1)
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
Timeline (1), 1997-2008
In early July 1997, DMITRIEV together with Irina Flige and the late Veniamin Joffe discovered a huge killing field of the Great Terror near Medvezhegorsk in Karelia. Subsequently it became known as Sandarmokh. Weeks later, in early September, he and Sergei Chugunkov identify the Krasny Bor killing field and burial ground not far from Petrozavodsk, … Continue reading Timeline (1), 1997-2008
The Guardian of History
On 22 August, an exhibition opened in the Chamber Theatre («Петербургский интерьерный театр») at 104 Nevsky Prospect in St Petersburg about the historian and rights activist Yury DMITRIEV, the man who investigated one of the most terrible commemorative sites of the Great Terror, the Sandarmokh Clearing in Karelia. The organiser was Svetlana Kulchitskaya. She decided … Continue reading The Guardian of History
The Dmitriev Affair 