Mikhail Rogachov (died 3 January 2021)
A sad loss. For years the historian Mikhail ROGACHOV studied the history of the Gulag in the Komi Republic (Northwest Russia) and was compiler, author and editor of the Pokayanie Fund’s Book of Remembrance, Repentance: The Komi Republic’s Martyrology of the Victims of Mass Political Repression.
Continue readingScattered across the length and breadth of Russia (see Map of Memory), and neighbouring Kazakhstan, are hundreds of neglected or concealed burial grounds. Some 1,500 are currently known; others await commemoration or discovery.
Belbaltlag prisoners’ cemetery, discovered by Yury Dmitriev in August 2003
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, the capital of Karelia.
Continue readingAnatoly Razumov
“Their Names Restored” (St Petersburg)
Yury DMITRIEV’s friend and colleague describes recent acquisitions by his Centre and work on the forthcoming second volume of Sandarmokh, a Place of Remembrance, that incorporates Dmitriev’s extensive research on those forcibly deported with their families to Karelia in the early 1930s:
Continue readingSince the late 1980s volunteers all over Russia and other former Soviet republics have compiled lists naming the men and women arrested, imprisoned and shot during Stalin’s time, and published regional Books of Remembrance about them.
Working with Ivan Chukhin, Yury DMITRIEV compiled such a volume for Karelia. Published in 2002, it contains over 14,000 names.
Nikolai KRESTOVSKY, shot 2 December 1942
