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Sandarmokh (russian: Сандармох; krl, Sandarmoh) is a forest massif from
Medvezhyegorsk Medvezhyegorsk (russian: Медвежьего́рск; krl, Karhumägi; fi, Karhumäki) is a town and the administrative center of Medvezhyegorsky District of the Republic of Karelia, Russia. Population: 15,800 (1959). History A village in ...
in the
Republic of Karelia The Republic of Karelia (russian: Респу́блика Каре́лия, Respublika Kareliya; ; krl, Karjalan tašavalta; ; fi, Karjalan tasavalta; vep, Karjalan Tazovaldkund, Ludic: ''Kard’alan tazavald''), also known as just Karelia (rus ...
where possibly thousands of victims of Stalin's Great Terror were executed. More than 58 nationalities were shot and buried there by the
NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union. ...
in 236 communal pits over a 14-month period in 1937 and 1938. A thousand of the victims were from the Solovki special prison in the
White Sea The White Sea (russian: Белое море, ''Béloye móre''; Karelian and fi, Vienanmeri, lit. Dvina Sea; yrk, Сэрако ямʼ, ''Serako yam'') is a southern inlet of the Barents Sea located on the northwest coast of Russia. It is su ...
. It was long thought that the barges carrying them were deliberately sunk on the way to the mainland, drowning all the prisoners on board. Others were rounded up during the Great Terror in Karelia, in accordance with quotas for prisoners, 'enemies of the regime', and a variety of "national operations". According to available documentation at least 6,000 were shot and buried at Sandarmokh."Half those shot in 1937–1938 ..."
. ''dmitrievaffair.com''
Today Sandarmokh is a memorial to the crimes of Stalin and his regime and since 1998 has been the focus of an international Day of Remembrance on 5 August every year.
''heninen.net''


Discovery and remembrance

On 27 October 1937, 1,116 prisoners were loaded onto three barges and taken from Solovki to the mainland. Only in 1996, thanks to the efforts of Veniamin Ioffe (1938–2002), co-chairman of the Memorial research centre in St Petersburg, documents were found in the archives of the Arkhangelsk department of the
Federal Security Service The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) RF; rus, Федеральная служба безопасности Российской Федерации (ФСБ России), Federal'naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Feder ...
(FSB) throwing light on the subsequent fate of the "first Solovki transport". These included 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 The Gulag, an acronym for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the GPU was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= was the government agency in ...
.) After years of work on the ground in Karelia by Yuri Dmitriev, this documentary evidence pointed the way to the identification on 1 July 1997 of the Solovki prisoners' last resting place and that of another 5,000 executed individuals. The location would subsequently be given the local (Karelian) name "Sandarmokh" (sometimes spelled "Sandormokh"). The story of that search and discovery was told in 2017 by Irina Flige, head of the Memorial Education and Information Centre in St Petersburg. In 2015 Dmitriev recounted how he, Flige and the late Veniamin Ioffe had found the burial site. According to documents found in the FSB archives in Arkhangelsk, there were people of 58 nationalities among those shot at Sandarmokh. Three hundred personal plaques and memorials have been erected around the site since 1997 to commemorate the many victims of this killing field, both individually and as representatives of particular nations and cultures, 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 at Sandarmokh, just as he and his predecessor Alexy II have done, every year since 2007, at the Butovo killing field near Moscow. Today, thanks to the
Memorial Society Memorial ( rus, Мемориал, p=mʲɪmərʲɪˈaɫ) is an international human rights organisation, founded in Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union to study and examine the human rights violations and other crimes committed under Joseph ...
, to Veniamin Ioffe and Yury Dmitriev, over 5,000 of the dead of Sandarmokh can again be named and remembered individually, at the place where they lie buried.
Ukraine Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...
declared 2012 as "Sandarmokh List Year" in reference to several hundred
Ukrainian language Ukrainian ( uk, украї́нська мо́ва, translit=ukrainska mova, label=native name, ) is an East Slavic language of the Indo-European language family. It is the native language of about 40 million people and the official state langu ...
writers and poets from the
Executed Renaissance The Executed Renaissance (or "Red Renaissance", uk, Розстріляне відродження, Червоний ренесанс, translit=Rozstriliane vidrodzhennia, Chervonyi renesans) is a term used to describe the generatio ...
who were arrested, shot, and buried at Sandarmokh after the
Great Turn The Great Turn or Great Break (Russian: Великий перелом) was the radical change in the economic policy of the USSR from 1928 to 1929, primarily consisting of the process by which the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921 was abandoned ...
, when new Soviet General Secretary
Joseph Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secreta ...
decided, as a preliminary to the
Holodomor The Holodomor ( uk, Голодомо́р, Holodomor, ; derived from uk, морити голодом, lit=to kill by starvation, translit=moryty holodom, label=none), also known as the Terror-Famine or the Great Famine, was a man-made famin ...
, to reverse the Post-1917 policies of '' Korenizatsiya'' and
Ukrainianization Ukrainization (also spelled Ukrainisation), sometimes referred to as Ukrainianization (or Ukrainianisation) is a policy or practice of increasing the usage and facilitating the development of the Ukrainian language and promoting other elements of ...
. These otherwise Pro-Soviet writers refused to submit to Stalin's return to the House of Romanov's policy of the coercive Russification of Ukraine and were shot, according to the Ukrainian Government, because they inspired the people of Ukraine with their own national culture, filling them "with pride and strength".


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, a total of 2,344 free inhabitants of the republic. A smaller number (624) were forced "settlers" (i.e. peasants exiled to the North after the collectivisation of agriculture). A great many of those shot (1,988) were already prisoners of the Belbaltlag ( White Sea-Baltic Canal) camp system. A smaller group of 1,111 prisoners were brought there from
Solovki prison camp The Solovki special camp (later the Solovki special prison), was set up in 1923 on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea as a remote and inaccessible place of detention, primarily intended for socialist opponents of Soviet Russia's new Bolshev ...
. Together they made up almost half of those shot during the Great Terror in Karelia. "Alongside hard-working peasants, fishermen and hunters from nearby villages," wrote Yury Dmitriev wrote: "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—for example, Finns, Karelians, and Volga Germans. Ukraine was especially singled out, losing 289 of its writers, dramatists and other public figures, the "
Executed Renaissance The Executed Renaissance (or "Red Renaissance", uk, Розстріляне відродження, Червоний ренесанс, translit=Rozstriliane vidrodzhennia, Chervonyi renesans) is a term used to describe the generatio ...
", in a single day. The following 25 individuals illustrate this variety. They are listed by surname in alphabetical order: *Prince ,
Imperial Russian Army The Imperial Russian Army (russian: Ру́сская импера́торская а́рмия, tr. ) was the armed land force of the Russian Empire, active from around 1721 to the Russian Revolution of 1917. In the early 1850s, the Russian Ar ...
officer, actor and theatre director: shot 27 October 1937, aged 44 *Fyodor Bagrov, head of collective farm, Karelia: shot 22 April 1938, aged 42 *
Shio Batmanishvili Shio Batmanishvili (in Georgian: შიო ბათმანიშვილი, born in 1885 in Akhaltsikhe, Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire – November 1, 1937, Sandarmokh, Karelia, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) was a Geo ...
, a
Georgian Georgian may refer to: Common meanings * Anything related to, or originating from Georgia (country) ** Georgians, an indigenous Caucasian ethnic group ** Georgian language, a Kartvelian language spoken by Georgians **Georgian scripts, three scrip ...
Hieromonk A hieromonk ( el, Ἱερομόναχος, Ieromonachos; ka, მღვდელმონაზონი, tr; Slavonic: ''Ieromonakh'', ro, Ieromonah), also called a priestmonk, is a monk who is also a priest in the Eastern Orthodox Church and E ...
, the Superior of the
Servites of the Immaculate Conception There are a number of Roman Catholic religious orders or congregations with Immaculate Conception in their name. Several of them are discussed here. Order of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady (The Conceptionists) Founded in 1484 at Toled ...
, and both the
Apostolic Administrator An Apostolic administration in the Catholic Church is administrated by a prelate appointed by the pope to serve as the ordinary for a specific area. Either the area is not yet a diocese (a stable 'pre-diocesan', usually missionary apostolic admi ...
and
Exarch An exarch (; from Ancient Greek ἔξαρχος ''exarchos'', meaning “leader”) was the holder of any of various historical offices, some of them being political or military and others being ecclesiastical. In the late Roman Empire and ea ...
of the Georgian Greek Catholic Church, shot 1 November 1937, * Nikolai Durnovo, Russian linguist, shot 27 October 1937, aged 60 *
Hryhorii Epik Hryhorii Danylovych Epik ( uk, Григорій Данилович Епік) (January 17, 1901 – November 3, 1937) was a Ukrainian writer and journalist. He supported the Soviet Ukrainization during the 1920s, which likely led to his arrest and ...
, Ukrainian writer: shot 3 November 1937, aged 36 * Vasily Helmersen, Russian librarian and artist: shot 9 December 1937, aged 64 *, a Karelian writer: shot 8 January 1938, aged 39 * Myroslav Irchan, Ukrainian writer, journalist, and playwright: shot 3 November 1937, aged 40 *Alexei Kostin, member of collective farm, Karelia: shot 9 March 1938, aged 39 *, organiser of an underground Catholic group in Moscow: shot 27 October 1937, aged 45 *
Mykola Kulish Mykola Hurovych Kulish ( uk, Микола Гурович Куліш) (19 December 1892 – 3 November 1937) was a Ukrainian prose writer, playwright, pedagogue, veteran of World War I, and Red Army veteran. He is considered to be one of the le ...
, Ukrainian writer, educator, journalist, and playwright: shot 3 November 1937, aged 40 *
Les Kurbas Oleksandr-Zenon Stepanovych Kurbas ( ua , Олександр-Зенон Степанович Курбас; 24 February 1887– 30 November 1937), was a Ukrainian Ukrainian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Ukraine * Something rel ...
, Ukrainian theater director: shot 3 November 1937, aged 50 *, Udmurt writer and public figure: shot 1 November 1937, aged 39 *, literary critic: shot 4 November 1937, aged 32 * Valerian Pidmohylny, a Ukrainian writer: shot 3 November 1937, aged 37 *
Mykhailo Poloz Mykhailo Mykolayovych Poloz ( uk, Михайло Микола́йович Полоз; 23 December 1891 – 3 November 1937) was a Ukrainian and Soviet politician, diplomat, and statesman, and a participant at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Biog ...
, a Ukrainian politician, diplomat, statesman, and participant of the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (also known as the Treaty of Brest in Russia) was a separate peace, separate peace treaty signed on 3 March 1918 between Russian SFSR, Russia and the Central Powers (German Empire, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Kingdom of ...
: shot 3 November 1937, aged 45 *Nikita Remnev, carpenter, Karelia: shot 3 April 1938, aged 37 *, Ukrainian military leader: shot 3 November 1937, aged 50 *, Soviet diplomat, ex-Bolshevik: shot 4 November 1937, aged 62 *Kalle Toppinen, Finn, carpenter, Karelia: shot 5 March 1938, aged 45 *, Finnish journalist: shot 28 December 1937, aged 41 *Archbishop of
Kursk Kursk ( rus, Курск, p=ˈkursk) is a city and the administrative center of Kursk Oblast, Russia, located at the confluence of the Kur, Tuskar, and Seym rivers. The area around Kursk was the site of a turning point in the Soviet–German stru ...
and Oboyan,
Russian Orthodox Church , native_name_lang = ru , image = Moscow July 2011-7a.jpg , imagewidth = , alt = , caption = Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, Russia , abbreviation = ROC , type ...
: shot 3 November 1937, aged 64 *Father ,
Volga German The Volga Germans (german: Wolgadeutsche, ), russian: поволжские немцы, povolzhskiye nemtsy) are ethnic Germans who settled and historically lived along the Volga River in the region of southeastern European Russia around Saratov a ...
Roman Catholic priest: shot 3 November 1937, aged 45 *Anton Yablotsky, Polish "special settler" from Ukraine: shot 21 January 1938, aged 37 *
Mykhailo Yalovy Mykhailo Yalovy ( uk , Михайло Омелянович Яловий) (5 June 1895 – 3 November 1937), also known under the his pen name Yulian Shpol, was a Ukrainian communist poet-futurist, prose writer and playwright. He is considered ...
, Ukrainian writer, publicist, playwright: shot 3 November 1937, aged 42 *
Mykola Zerov Mykola Kostiantynovych Zerov (Ukrainian: Микола Костянтинович Зеров; 26 April 1890, in Zinkiv, Poltava Governorate – 3 November 1937, in Sandarmokh, KareliaFinnish diaspora The Finnish diaspora consists of Finnish emigrants and their descendants, especially those that maintain some of the customs of their Finnish culture. Finns emigrated to the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Canada, Australia, Argentina ...
who emigrated to the
USSR The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
during the
Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...
and who were later arrested and shot at Sandarmokh as a part of the
Finnish Operation of the NKVD The Finnish Operation of the NKVD was a mass arrest, execution and deportations of persons of Finnish origin in the Soviet Union by the NKVD during the period of Great Purge (1937–1938). It was a part of the larger mass operations of the NKVD wh ...
, are listed by
John Earl Haynes John Earl Haynes (born 1944) is an American historian who worked as a specialist in 20th-century political history in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. He is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist and anti- ...
and Harvey Klehr in their study ''In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage'' (2003). They included 141 Finnish Americans, and 127
Finnish Canadian Finnish Canadians are Canadian citizens of Finnish ancestry or Finns who emigrated to and reside in Canada. In 2016, 143,645 Canadians claimed Finnish ancestry. Finns started coming to Canada in the early 1880s, and in much larger numbers in the e ...
s.


Victims and executioners

It is often said or assumed of Soviet mass executions that they were carried out by
firing squad Execution by firing squad, in the past sometimes called fusillading (from the French ''fusil'', rifle), is a method of capital punishment, particularly common in the military and in times of war. Some reasons for its use are that firearms are us ...
. 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 infamous "nine grammes of lead". The victims tumbled into the trench and were buried; sometimes another, control 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. (A rare, extended description by a former executioner of how such mass killings were organised can be found in
Lev Razgon Lev Emmanuilovich Razgon (russian: Лев Эммануи́лович Разго́н; 1 April 1908 – 8 September 1999) was a Soviet journalist, a prisoner of the Gulag from 1938 to 1942 and again from 1950 to 1955, a Russian writer and, latterly ...
's 1988 memoirs.) This was the method used at Sandarmokh, Krasny Bor and
Svirlag Svirlag, SvirLAG (Svirskiy Lager' – Svir Concentration-Camp, russian: Свирлаг, also / – ) was a Soviet forced labour camp run by NKVD's GULAG Directorate. It was located on the river Svir (hence the name Svirskiy in Russian) in the for ...
in the late 1930s, as the skulls found at these sites amply testify. Cross-examined while under arrest in 1939, the chief executioner Mikhail Matveyev said he made the victims lie face down in the prepared trench and then shot them.Nikita Petrov, "The butchers of Sandarmokh", ''Novaya gazeta'', No. 84, 4 August 2017
, pp. 8–9 ''www.novayagazeta.ru'' .
Thanks to the efforts of Ivan Chukhin, founder of Memorial in Karelia, a national deputy to the Supreme Soviet (and the Duma) and Yury Dmitriev's mentor, 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 became known by the mid-1990s. The man sent from Leningrad on 16 October 1937 to organise the shooting of the Solovki transport, Matveyev, was an experienced NKVD executioner. He was succeeded at Sandarmokh by I.A. Bondarenko and his deputy A.F. Shondysh. Matveyev survived into old age; his successors were both arrested in 1938 and shot in 1939 for "exceeding their authorisation".Anatoly Razumov, ''Skorbny put: Solovetskie etapy, 1937–1938''
''visz.nlr.ru'' , Appendix 2: Those involved in selecting and shooting the Solovki transports, pp. 36–40.


New digs and alternative hypothesis

Starting in 2016, there were attempts to revise this account of the shootings at Sandarmokh, and claim that among the dead were Soviet POWs shot by the invading Finns in 1941–1944. There were newspaper articles and TV broadcasts in Russia; there was also a publication in the Finnish press. In the same year, a sexual abuse investigation against Yuri Dmitriyev was launched by authorities. The motivation behind this claim and the supposed new evidence were both challenged. In a lengthy and detailed investigation, Russian journalist Anna Yarovaya examined the evidence and interviewed historians and those who had found the site. She talked to Finnish historians of the Second World War; Irina Flige of the
Memorial Society Memorial ( rus, Мемориал, p=mʲɪmərʲɪˈaɫ) is an international human rights organisation, founded in Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union to study and examine the human rights violations and other crimes committed under Joseph ...
and Sergei Kashtanov, head of the district administration where the killing fields were found. She also interviewed Sergei Verigin, one of the Russian historians putting forward the new hypothesis. Russian newspapers and television had talked of "thousands" of POWs being shot by the Finns and buried at Sandarmokh: speaking on the record to Yarovaya, Verigin was more cautious and spoke of dozens and hundreds. The Karelian edition of the State-run Rossiya TV channel announced briefly on 22 April 2018 that there would be new investigations at Sandarmokh "this summer".
Agence France-Presse Agence France-Presse (AFP) is a French international news agency headquartered in Paris, France. Founded in 1835 as Havas, it is the world's oldest news agency. AFP has regional headquarters in Nicosia, Montevideo, Hong Kong and Washington, D.C ...
covered later developments in September 2018, citing critics who state that the digs have a political motivation to manipulate public opinion and an attempt to cover up Stalinist crimes. The European External Action Service's EUvsDisinfo.eu website has classified the claims that Finns are responsible for the Sandarmokh killings as "pro-Kremlin disinformation". The head of the local museum, Serge Koltyrin, was arrested in October 2018, shortly after he publicly criticized the new excavations. He was convicted in a closed trial of pedophilia for 9 years in prison. In early March 2020, a local court decided to release him due to a terminal illness, however, the prosecutor challenged this decision and Koltyrin died in a prison hospital on 2 April 2020.


Publications

*
Yury A. Dmitriev Yury Alexeyevich Dmitriev Юрий Алексеевич Дмитриев (born 28 January 1956, Petrozavodsk) is a local historian and activist in Karelia (Northwest Russia). Since the early 1990s, he has worked to locate the execution sites of St ...
(1999), ''Sandarmokh, the Place of Execution'' (in Russian), 350 pp. Bars Publishers: Petrozavodsk.Book in pdf format
, ''imwerden.de''.
*Yury A. Dmitriev (2002), (with , ''The Karelian Lists of Remembrance: Murdered Karelia, part 2, The Great Terror'' (in Russian), 1,088 pp. Petrozavodsk. (Also available onlin
«Поминальные списки Карелии, 1937–1938: Уничтоженная Карелия, часть 2. Большой террор»
) The Lists contain over 14,000 names.


See also

*
Kommunarka shooting ground The Kommunarka firing range (russian: Расстрельный полигон «Коммунарка»), former dacha of secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda, was used as a burial ground from 1937 to 1941. Executions may have been carried out th ...
*
Mass graves in the Soviet Union In July 2010, a mass grave was discovered next to the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, containing the corpses of 80 military officers executed during the Red Terror of 1918–1921. By 2013 a total of 156 bodies had been found in the sa ...
*
Memorial (society) Memorial ( rus, Мемориал, p=mʲɪmərʲɪˈaɫ) is an international human rights organisation, founded in Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union to study and examine the Human rights in the Soviet Union, human rights violations and o ...
* People shot and buried in Sandarmokh (Russian Wikipedia)


References


External links

*
Пам’яті жертв соловецького розстрілу, «Львівська газета», 4 April 2007
retrieved 7 August 2017
Their Names Restored: Russia's Books of Remembrance website, Search: "Sandarmokh", "Kniga pamyati Karelii", 4,974 names. Retrieved 7 August 2017 "Those killed at Sandormokh in 1937-8, a list of 5,126 names compiled by the historian Yury A. Dmitriev", Sandormokh, Ioffe Foundation website
Retrieved 13 August 2017
Nikita Petrov, "The butchers of Sandarmokh", ''Novaya gazeta'', No. 84, 4 August 2017
pp. 8–9 . *Also se

with acknowledgements to the Karelian Republic's Ministry of Culture
Russia's Necropolis of Terror and the Gulag: a select directory of burial grounds and commemorative sites
{{coord, 62, 51, 49, N, 34, 43, 12, E, region:RU_type:landmark, display=title
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
Great Purge Massacres in the Soviet Union Political repression in the Soviet Union NKVD Politicides Monuments and memorials in Russia Cultural heritage monuments of regional significance in the Republic of Karelia