During the Great Terror almost 11,000 men and women were executed in Karelia. In his database Yury DMITRIEV followed NKVD reports and noted that during those months the death sentence was carried out 4,975 times “at the Medvezhya gora rail station”. Sandarmokh monument as originally designed with Guardian Angel This is not surprising. The headquarters … Continue reading Half those shot in 1937-1938 … lie buried at Sandarmokh?
Great Terror (Karelia)*
The Great Terror in Karelia
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
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
First Discoveries, 1988-1991
The first time Yury DMITRIEV came across the unmarked remains of those shot during the Great Terror was in 1988, as he describes in My Path to Golgotha (pt 2). The immediate reaction since the 1950s was to cover up these bones and skulls with their tell-tale bullet holes. Now activists and relatives of those … Continue reading First Discoveries, 1988-1991
The Dmitriev Affair 