Scattered across the length and breadth of Russia (see “Russia’s Necropolis”), and neighbouring Kazakhstan, are hundreds of neglected or concealed burial grounds. Some 1,500 are currently known, three hundred more than in 2019; others still await commemoration or discovery.

Belbaltlag prisoners’ cemetery, discovered by Yury Dmitriev in August 2003

They are the last resting place of those who died far from home, deported to “special” settlements, now often abandoned (see Rabog ss, 11-54), or to the Gulag’s numerous camps (see Belbaltlag, 10-8). Others were executed and buried in mass graves not far from local population centres, during the 1920s and especially in the sixteen months of the Great Terror, in the secret and unmarked killing fields (see Perm, 59-01) of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD.

Some of these burial grounds are today Places of Remembrance. Few have official recognition as such or the protection of the regional, city or federal authorities. In 2016, the location and current use of over four hundred of these sites in Russia were described in detail by the Joffe Foundation of St Petersburg on its Map of Memory website, “Russia’s Necropolis of Terror and the Gulag“.

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The fate of eight men and their families in the 1930s offer glimpses of human suffering on a vast scale (see Shot, Imprisoned, Deported, Recaptured).

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