Sandarmokh

The monumental slab at the entrance to the Sandarmokh burial grounds reads: "People! do not kill one another".
Memorial to Ukrainians shot at Sandarmokh.

Sandarmokh (Russian: Сандармо́х; Karelian: Sandarmoh) is a forest massif 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) from Medvezhyegorsk in the Republic of Karelia where thousands of victims of Stalin's Great Purge were executed. Over 9,000 people of more than 58 nationalities were shot and buried there in 236 communal pits during a 14-month period in 1937 and 1938.[1]

Over a thousand of the victims were from the Solovki "special" prison in the White Sea. It was long thought that the barge carrying them was deliberately sunk on its way to the mainland, drowning all the prisoners on board.

Today Sandarmokh is a memorial to that and other crimes of Stalin and his regime and serves as the focus of an international Day of Remembrance.[2]

Discovery and Remembrance

On 27 October 1937, 1,116 prisoners were loaded onto a barge and taken from Solovki to the mainland.

Only in 1995, thanks to the efforts of Venyamin Ioffe (1938-2002), then director of the Memorial research centre in St Petersburg, were documents found in the archives of the Arkhangelsk department of the FSB throwing light on the subsequent fate of the "first Solovki transport", including the lists of those men and women who were to be shot. (One died before he could be executed; four more were sent to other parts of the Gulag.)

Following this discovery, and after years of work on the ground in Karelia by Yury A. Dmitriev, the last resting place of more than 9,000 people was finally identified on 1 July 1997. The location would subsequently be given the local (Karelian) name "Sandarmokh". The story of that search and discovery has recently been told by Irina Flige, head of the Memorial Education and Information Centre in St Petersburg.[3]

Monuments have been erected around the site since 1997 to commemorate the many victims of this killing field, individually and as representatives of particular nations and cultures,[2][4][5] and an international Day of Remembrance has been held there every 5 August since 1998. In 2010, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church led the mass for the slain victims of Stalin who now, thanks to the Memorial Society, Venyamin Ioffe and Yury Dmitriev, the head of Memorial in Karelia, can once again be named and remembered individually, at the place where they lie buried.[6]

According to the documents found by Ioffe in the departmental archives of the Russian Federal Security Service in Arkhangelsk, there were people of 58 nationalities among those shot at Sandarmokh.

Ukraine declared 2012 as "Sandarmokh List Year" in reference to several hundred members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia who were executed there because they inspired the people of Ukraine with their own national culture, filling them with pride and strength.[7]

Those shot at Sandarmokh, 1937-1938

The thousands executed over 14 months from October 1937 to December 1938 fall into three broad groups.

Many were from Karelia. More were prisoners or "special settlers" (i.e. peasants exiled to the North after collectivisation) who worked on the White Sea Canal. A smaller group was brought there from Solovki. According to the archives, Dmitriev wrote, a total of over nine thousand men and women were shot at Sandarmokh during this period:[8]

"3,500 were inhabitants of Karelia, 4,500 were prisoners working for the White Sea - Baltic Canal, and 1,111 were brought here from the Solovki "special" prison. Alongside hard-working peasants, fishermen and hunters from nearby villages, there were writers and poets, scientists and scholars, military leaders, doctors, teachers, engineers, clergy of all confessions and statesmen who found their final resting place here."

Among the last named group were prominent members of the intelligentsia from the many national and ethnic cultures of the USSR—among them Finns, Karelians, and Volga Germans. Ukraine was especially singled out, losing 289 of its intellectuals, "the flower of the nation", in a single day.

The following 20 individuals illustrate this variety. They are listed by surname in alphabetical order:

People of Finnish origin who emigrated to the USSR and were later arrested and shot at Sandarmokh by the NKVD, are listed by John Earl Haynes & Harvey Klehr in their study In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage (2003). They included 141 Finnish Americans,[11] and 127 Finnish Canadians.[12]

Victims and Executioners

It is often said or assumed of Soviet mass executions that they were carried out by firing squad. For the Soviet regime and, later, the Third Reich, this method of execution was the exception, not the rule.

From early days onwards, the preferred Soviet method of quick despatch was to dig a trench and then, the executioner standing immediately behind the upright or kneeling victim, shoot the victims at point blank range in the back of the head. This was the famous "nine grammes of lead". The victims tumbled into the trench and were buried; sometimes another shot (контрольный выстрел, kontrolnyi vystrel) was fired into the victim's head to make sure he or she was dead, sometimes only one shot was used. This was the method used at Sandarmokh, Krasny Bor and Svirlag in the late 1930s, as the skulls found at these sites amply testify. A rare description by a former executioner of how such mass killings were organised can be found in Lev Razgon's memoirs.[13]

Yury Dmitriev went one step further than many of those who have attempted since the late 1980s to commemorate the victims of the Stalin years. Together with Razumov he also published, to the indignation of their descendants and, some suggest, of the present regime,[14] the names of the members of the troika which rubber-stamped decisions to shoot a list of individuals (the accused were not present at these sessions, no one defended their rights) and of the execution squad leaders.[15][16]

Publications

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Захоронение жертв массовых репрессий (1937-1938 гг.)". Center for State Protection of Cultural Heritage of the Republic of Karelia. Republic of Karelia. Retrieved 15 August 2015.
  2. 1 2 "Sandarmokh"
  3. ↑ Anna Yarovaya, "The Dmitriev Affair", Rights in Russia, 20 March 2017 and The Russian Reader, 1 March 2017. Russian original published on 7 x 7 website, February 2017.
  4. ↑ "Pictorial essay: Death trenches bear witness to Stalin's purges" CNN, July 17, 1997
  5. ↑ Урочище Сандармох. Захоронение жертв массовых репрессий (1937—1938 гг.) (in Russian)
  6. ↑ John Crowfoot, "Who is Yury Dmitriev?" Rights in Russia, 19 June 2017.
  7. ↑ Kupriienko, Oleksandr; Siundiukov, Ihor; Tomak, Maria; Skuba, Viktoria; Poludenko, Anna. "2012, Sandarmokh List Year: how can we get rid of totalitarian legacy?". Den online newspaper, 24 January 2012 (Accessed 7 August 2017).
  8. ↑ "The Solovki transports, 1937-1938", Returning the Names website (in Russian).
  9. ↑ "Natsionalnyje pisateli Karelii: finskaja emigratsija i politicheskije Repressii 1930h godov: biobibliograficheski ukazatel" (National Library of Karelia, Finnish emigration and the 1930 policy of retaliation: a bio-bibliographical index), Petrozavodsk, 2005, pp. 40-41. ISBN 5-7378-0074-1
  10. ↑ Pavel Chichikov, "Modern Martyrdoms", Catholic Exchange website, 9 February 2003 (retrieved 7 August 2017).
  11. ↑ John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage, 2003, ISBN 1-59403-088-X, Appendix: "The Invisible Dead: American Communists and Radicals Executed by Soviet Political Police and Buried at Sandarmokh", p. 235.
  12. ↑ John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage,Encounter Books, 2003. ISBN 1-893554-72-4 p. 117.
  13. ↑ Chapter Two, "Niyazov", Lev Razgon, True Stories -- Memoirs of a Survivor, Souvenir Press: London, 1997, pp. 21-34.
  14. ↑ Maria Shchur, inteview with Georgy Lukyanchuk, Radio Svoboda, 2 August 2017 (in Ukrainian).
  15. ↑ A Razumov, Skorbny put: Solovetskie etapy, 1937-1938 (in Russian), Appendix 2: Those involved in selecting and shooting the Solovki transports, pp. 36-40.
  16. ↑ Krasny Bor, 1937-1938.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sandarmokh.

Coordinates: 62°51′41″N 34°43′42″E / 62.86139°N 34.72833°E / 62.86139; 34.72833

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.