Remembrance (3): Four brothers

13 May 202118 August 2025 / editors (JC)

Alexander Pokrovsky and his three brothers were born in a village in what today is Russia's Oryol Region. By the early 1930s, they had moved to Moscow. Ivan (1904-1933), Simeon (b. 1911), and Sergei (b. 1915) There in summer 1932 the OGPU (predecessor of the NKVD) arrested them and by October that year all four … Continue reading Remembrance (3): Four brothers

The unquiet dead

11 December 20202 January 2022 / editors (JC)

Scattered across the length and breadth of Russia and its immediate neighbours (especially Kazakhstan), are hundreds of neglected or concealed burial grounds. Some 1,800 are currently known; others await commemoration or discovery. Belbaltlag prisoners’ cemetery, discovered by Yury Dmitriev in August 2003 See More ...

“We shall go on, naming names” (Razumov)

8 December 202018 August 2025 / editors (JC)

Anatoly 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: From all over the old Soviet … Continue reading “We shall go on, naming names” (Razumov)

Restoring the Names (2)

10 September 202018 August 2025 / editors (JC)

Since 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 … Continue reading Restoring the Names (2)