The mass-circulation Japanese daily Sankei Shimbun opened a series of 80 articles to mark the centenary of the October 1917 Revolution with two items (25-26 October 2017) concerning the Dmitriev Affair: “The prisoners who disappeared. Over five days 1,111 people were shot in the forest” and “The historian who discovered where the victims of Stalin were buried is himself being persecuted”.
Russian supporters’ Facebook page,
10 February 2018
On 26 December 2017, Karelian journalists described their new investigation, “Rewriting Sandarmokh”, at a discussion held at the Agrikalch Art Gallery in Petrozavodsk.
ANNA YAROVAYA told how the idea of conducting the investigation first arose. It was hard to find out who was trying to alter the history of the executions and burials at Sandarmokh, and why, she said. Continue reading
“As Russia marks the centenary of the October Revolution, President Vladimir Putin has urged the society to end discord over the Soviet era,” reported the TASS news agency[1] on 21 December 2017.
“This year, the centenary of the October Revolution, we have been seeking to encourage the society to abandon confrontation, to see themselves as a single society and realize that we are continuing our common centuries-long history,” Putin told a session of the Council for Culture and Art.
“Whether we like certain years or not, but there was everything there – bad things, but also a lot of good things that should not be forgotten,” he said.
Johnson’s Russia List
2017-#239, Friday, 22 December 2017, Item 1 (Excerpt)
Nikita Petrov (Memorial)
Every spring, buses covered in portraits of Joseph Stalin appear on the streets of Russian cities. His face replaces ads for cell phones, soft drinks, laundry detergent, and cat food. With each passing year, the dictator gets more handsome and more glamorous; a portrait of him in his gorgeous white generalissimo’s jacket has become especially popular. He casts his stern gaze on the citizens, as if to say, “Remember me? I’m here, I didn’t go anywhere – and don’t you forget it!”
Continue readingSince its discovery in 1997, Sandarmokh has become a place of pilgrimage for the descendants of those killed in Stalin’s Great Terror, for local villagers, for historians and for public figures. An International Day of Remembrance has been held at Sandarmokh every year since then, attended by delegations from various parts of Russia and from abroad.
The “new” hypothesis
Yet in 2016, almost twenty years on, certain Petrozavodsk historians announced that, in addition to those shot in the 1930s, Soviet POWs might have been killed and buried at Sandarmokh during the “Continuation War” with Finland (1941-1944). This suggestion prompted a great debate among academics and was reported in both Russian and Finnish media. Prospectors, historians, and public figures who had been closely involved in locating, studying and publicising the story of Sandarmokh were bewildered. What new documents had now appeared? Where could they study these declassified papers? The authors of the sensational claim were in no hurry to publish their sources and the atmosphere surrounding the memorial complex grew increasingly tense.
On Tuesday, 26 December, we were waiting for two reports: one about what happened that day at the Petrozavodsk City Court; the other, an account of a recent investigation into the new row over who is buried at Sandarmokh, and how they died.
An excerpt from a long interview with MARIA KARP on Radio Svoboda last Friday, concerning her major new biography of George Orwell (1903-1950), sets these issues in a broad context that embraces the last century as well as this.
***
As a board member of the Pushkin Club, Maria (Masha) Karp opened the recent London evening in support of Yury Dmitriev. In the following response concerning Orwell’s continuing relevance, she quotes the example of Dmitriev’s work and his present trial.
The Dmitriev Affair 