Russian government excavates mass graves — “politically motivated” attempt to “rewrite history”

Excavations at Sandarmokh (photo: 7x7)

KHPG: Barbaric excavations underway to rewrite history
7x7: Social activists defend monument to victims of Stalinist terror (Russian)
Memorial Society: New excavation in Sandarmokh (Russian)

Sandarmokh Clearing, a wooded area in rocky terrain in northern Russia 100 miles east of the Finnish border, secretly held the bodies of more than 9,000 people from within and without the USSR executed during Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937–38 and buried in more than 200 communal pits. Documents from the era identify thousands of those killed and buried there by name — Russians, Karelians, Finns, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Tatars, Udmurts, Jewish, Gypsies, Germans, Poles and other nationalities.

For the past 20 years, since its discovery by an expedition led by historian Yuri Dmitriev, Sandarmokh has been the site of a memorial cemetery and an annual day of remembrance of those killed.

This week, though, the Russian government began a new round of excavating bodies at Sandarmokh in an attempt to back its claim of recent years that the dead were not Stalin’s victims, but were Russian prisoners of war executed by Finnish soldiers during World War II.

President Putin’s regime has worked to recast Josef Stalin as a heroic figure from Russia’s glorious past, whose legacy lives today in Putin. Beginning in June 2016, Russian officials have claimed that the bodies found at Sandarmokh were killed not by Stalin’s forces, but by Nazi-aligned Polish invaders.

Six months later Dmitriev, a longtime seeker of hidden mass graves, was arrested and charged with child pornography. He was acquitted, then arrested again on new charges of rape of his adopted daughter. His case is ongoing, with testimonies in recent weeks.

A few weeks ago Sergei Solovyov, the Acting Minister of Culture for the Republic of Karelia, where Sandarmokh is located, issued a letter requesting a comprehensive study of the Sandarmokh Memorial Complex to find confirmation that the site contains only remains of Soviet citizens held in Finnish concentration camps during the war.

Activists have protested what they call an attempt to “rewrite history” despite ample historical documentation. A post by the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group quotes Solovyov’s letter at length as well as a response from Memorial Society, an anti-Communist group which sponsored the original expedition. Memorial claims that in contrast to the thousands of executions documented in Stalin-era files, advocates of the Finnish POW theory “cannot name the names of the people they are looking for — not a single name.”

John Crowfoot, a translator who runs the Dmitriev Affair website, says the excavations are “a revival of a classic piece of Soviet deception. Stalin’s massacre at Katyn in 1940 was persistently blamed on the invading Germans a year later, yet notably not pressed as a war crime at the Nuremberg Tribunal. Only in 1989 did Gorbachev acknowledge the truth. Now, Putin’s regime is trying to repeat Stalin’s Katyn ruse at Sandarmokh.”

Additional Resources
English-language blog tracking Dmitriev’s case: https://dmitrievaffair.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FreeYuDmitriev
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/149118228983728/

Contact

Elizabeth Childs
President, Russian Human Rights Alert
San Francisco
Russian.human.rights.alert@gmail.com
+1 510–547–2589