Alec Luhn - Gulag grave hunter unearths uncomfortable truths in Russia
NB: The Russian government seeks to control the past; just like in the heyday of the USSR. Old habits die hard. The struggle for democracy is worldwide - DS
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.
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
piecespainting 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.”
Located near the
Solovetsky islands, the birthplace of the gulag, the Karelia region in
north-west Russia is where tens of thousands of prisoners were shot or died
digging the infamous White Sea canal for Stalin’s first five-year plan. As an
aide to a regional official, Dmitriyev first began searching for their graves
after being summoned to deal with remains uncovered by an excavator at a
military base in 1988. Soon he began trying
to identify victims of the mass executions, which were carried out covertly.
During the brief period when secret police archives were opened up in the
1990s, Dmitriyev managed to read thousands of execution orders into his tape
recorder. He could then try to match each group of skeletons he found to a
specific order.
It was Flige’s long
search for the disappeared “Solovetsky etape”, a group of 1,111 prisoners
including many leading political, cultural and religious figures from across
the Soviet Union, that led them to Sandormokh. Following hints from the
testimony of the executioner Mikhail Matveyev, Flige, Dmitriyev and Veniamin
Iofe discovered the telltale pockmarks in the woods on the road to the White
Sea canal and began digging. 'It wasn’t just bones
but the bones of people I knew, whose children I knew", Flige recalled.
Today, wooden posts
stretch hundreds of yards back into the woods at Sandormokh with photographs
and names of victims. The local authorities
initially backed the memorial, helping build an access road and a chapel and
sending representatives to the day of remembrance on 5 August. But last year,
for the first time, no government or church officials attended. The political
temperature at Sandormokh has been rising since at least 2014, when Russia
annexed Crimea. The Ukrainian delegation, typically the largest, skipped the
ceremony that year, and in a speech Dmitriyev condemned Russia’s support for
separatists in eastern Ukraine.
He also suggested the
Russian government was failing to fully acknowledge its predecessor’s crimes, a
controversial stance amid the continuing surge of patriotism and Soviet
nostalgia. Stalin monuments have popped up in several towns across the country,
and the late dictator topped a survey in June for most
“outstanding” person of all time. Last summer, state media began reporting
the unfounded claim that Sandormokh actually holds Soviet soldiers killed by
the Finns.
In November state
television accused Memorial of helping “those who aim to destroy the Russian
state” after it published information on 40,000 Soviet secret police officials
and Dmitriyev reportedly received angry phone calls about his own participation
in the project. Dmitriyev was
unexpectedly arrested the next month after an anonymous source tipped police
off that nude photographs of his adopted daughter Natasha were stored on his
computer.
Wooden posts stretch back into the woods at Sandormokh
with photographs and names
of victims. Photo: Tomasz Kizny
Dmitriyev’s adult
daughter, Yekaterina Klodt, told the Guardian that her father, who had always
obsessively documented human remains with photographs and measurements, had
taken the shots to show Natasha was healthy in his care. Adopted himself as a
child, Dmitriyev had trouble receiving permission to adopt her from an
orphanage in 2009, and he wanted to document that the underweight child was
regaining her health, Klodt said. He also grew worried after one of her
teachers raised a furore over ink stains on the child’s skin she mistook for
bruises.\
Lev Shcheglov, the
president of the National Institute of Sexology in Moscow, testified at the
trial that the photographs could not be considered pornographic or abusive. The
prosecution is pushing ahead with the case, which also includes charges of
“perverted acts” and illegal possession of a firearm, namely the barrel of a
60-year-old hunting rifle Dmitriyev found, according to his lawyer.
Dmitriyev’s real
crime, his supporters believe, is his criticism of the government and work with
activists from geopolitical foes including Poland and Ukraine to commemorate
their countrymen at Sandormokh. “Russia doesn’t need
this now,” said Anna Yarovaya, a journalist for news site 7x7. “We’re searching
for enemies everywhere, including abroad, but for him, everyone was a friend.”
see also
EVGENIA LEZINA - The revival of ideology in Russia
