The pine trees creak and rustle ominously beneath even the faintest breeze, as if the vast forest between Lake Onega and the Finnish border remains reluctant to give up its dark secrets.
The secret police brought 6,241 gulag prisoners to these woods during Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror in 1937-8, put them face-down in pits dug in the sandy soil, and shot them in the back of the head with a revolver. As their remains decayed, the earth above each mass grave sank into the ground.
It was these pockmarks in the forest floor that helped Yury Dmitriyev and other members of Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights organisation, find this site at Sandormokh in 1997. It is one of the largest mass graves in the former Soviet Union.
With Memorial, the 61-year-old gulag grave hunter from nearby Petrozavodsk has dedicated much of three decades to the effort to return the victims of Soviet repressions from “state-sponsored oblivion”, publishing several books of names, dates and locations of executions since the discovery.
“For our government to become … accountable, we need to educate the people,” Dmitriyev said of his efforts to uncover details of Soviet repression.
But not everyone wants to remember this forgotten history, especially amid Russia’s current patriotic fervour. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said in June that “excessive demonisation” of Stalin has been a “means of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia”, and several branches of Memorial have been declared “foreign agents” in recent years.
For the first time in two decades Dmitriyev will miss the annual day of remembrance at Sandormokh on 5 August. Arrested in December and charged with taking indecent photographs of his 12-year-old adopted daughter, which he denies, he is being held in custody during the ongoing trial. He faces 15 years in prison if convicted.
An expert in sexual disorders has said the photographs are not pornographic, and Memorial and others argue that Dmitriyev is a political prisoner hounded for exposing a side of history that complicates the Kremlin’s glorification of the Soviet past.
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He is supported by his adult daughter, who said he took the photographs to document the child’s improving health in case social services attempted to remove her. The girl had been malnourished when Dmitriyev and his wife took her in, age three, and according to Dmitriyev’s lawyer, the photographs were stored in a folder called “child’s health”. Each had a note about her height, weight and general health and many were taken ahead of social worker visits.
More than 30,000 people have signed an online petition calling to “restore legality and justice” in his case. Meanwhile, state media have run smear pieces painting Dmitriyev as a paedophile and Memorial as anti-government subversives.
“Like in the period of the Great Terror, when political reprisals, murders, extrajudicial executions became the norm of Soviet life, so today persecution, arrests, beatings at rallies, the closing of independent organisations … have become the norm of life in Russia,” said Irina Flige, the director of St Petersburg Memorial, who discovered Sandormokh with Dmitriyev.
“The majority … thinks that the regime can do anything with an individual for the sake of its own interests.”
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