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?
Gulag*
Victims remembered
On the official Day in Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression, up to fifty people gathered outside Severodvinsk to commemorate those who worked and died in the Yagrinlag camp complex, building what is now the second largest city in the Arkhangelsk Region. Among those attending were relatives of the deceased prisoners and local historians, … Continue reading Victims remembered
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
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
Mikhail Rogachov, 1952-2021
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. Between 1998 and … Continue reading Mikhail Rogachov, 1952-2021
The Dmitriev Affair 