For nostalgias' sake, from my scr & scrm archives (011)
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From nikst@xxxxxxxxxx Sat Jul 19 23:41:23 EDT 1997
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 1997 22:13:50 CST
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From: "nikst" <nikst@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Stalin-Era Graves
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St. Petersburg Times
JULY 14-20, 1997
Massive Stalin-Era Graves Uncovered
By Charles Digges
STAFF WRITER
MEDVEZHYEGORSK, Northwest Russia - Almost 60 years after they disappeared
into the Gulag or simply vanished after midnight raids by the secret
police, the remains of more than 9,000 victims of Stalin's purges have been
found in a Karelian forest.
The haunting discovery in a remote grove of craggy fir trees between the
towns of Medvezhyegorsk and Povenets - 245 miles north of St. Petersburg -
constitutes what historians say is among the largest mass execution and
grave sites ever uncovered in European Russia.
"There are people in this town who have been looking all their lives for
the bones that lie out there in that forest," said Vyacheslav Kashtanov,
deputy mayor of Medvezhyegorsk, population 20,000, in an interview at his
office Wednesday.
"It was a positive, but not joyful discovery - probably half the people
here have a relative out there in those trenches," he said.
"At least we know where they are now."
The shattered skulls and twisted skeletons that fill those trenches,
covering 2 1/2 acres of isolated forest, belonged to 9,111 political
prisoners executed in 1937 by the NKVD - Stalin's secret police, and the
forerunner to the KGB - between October and November.
Skulls exhumed from the mass graves alongside a researcher's battered
shovel.
The victims were mostly prisoners used as slave labor to dig the White
Sea canal, as well as Karelian intellectuals and anti-revolutionaries from
the White Sea's Solovetskiye Islands prison camps.
The corpses were located after the historical society Memorial, working
with Medvezhyegorsk authorities, discovered written execution orders in the
archives of the Karelian and Leningrad Oblast NKVD.
"Lawyers, school teachers, scholars, professors, ethnic minorities,
religious leaders, university students, even simple workers - anyone who
could make a foundation or say the slightest thing to challenge the order -
those are the ones in these trenches," said Venyamin Yofe of Memorial's St.
Petersburg office in an interview this week.
"They were victims of the Bolshoi Terror [or Great Terror] of the
Stalinist Purges, which were at their height in 1937 and 1938 - this is
what our society lost."
The massive grave and execution site was finally opened on July 1 with
the help of local city, military and law enforcement authorities from
Medvezhyegorsk.
"Every half meter we found more and more skulls and bones, more and more
bullet casings," said Yofe, who was present at the time. "They were piled
one on top of another, anonymously, deeper and deeper until the trenches
filled."
According to Yury Dmitriyev, of Memorial's Karelian branch, the victims
had been stripped down to their underwear, bound hand and foot, and lined
up along the edge of the trenches. NKVD executioners then worked their way
down the line shooting the condemned, one by one, in the back of the head
with revolvers.
On July 2, a memorial service was held and the remains re-buried.
Today the sites are marked only by surveyor's stakes, and the occasional
flowers or keepsakes brought by locals to hang on trees or lay on the grass
in memory of their relatives.
Yofe said a monument would be built on the site in October.
The Karelian discovery is consistent with the reign of terror that was
in full swing from 1937 to 1938.
The late historian Dmitry Volkogonov, an authority on Stalin's purges,
has estimated that nearly 14 million people across Russia died in precisely
this manner in that two-year stretch.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev threw
open the KGB's archives. Thousands of such graves were subsequently
discovered across the territory of the former Soviet Union.
Even so, Robert Conquest, an expert on the purges at Stanford's Hoover
Institute, thinks there are still many thousands more graves to be
discovered - as illustrated by the Karelian site.
"Given the millions killed, it's odd that we haven't seen more of these
grave sites," he said, in an interview with the London Times.
In August 1937, Memorial's Yofe said that the NKVD ordered prison camp
wardens to submit lists of prisoners they thought were still conducting
anti-state agitation.
Tens of thousands of names were processed by the secret police and a
three-man panel, called the Osobaya Troika or "special three," signed the
death sentences and dispatched them back to thousands of gulags across
Russia.
Displaying copies of the death warrants for Karelia, Kashtanov said
Wednesday they had been in basement files at the Medvezhyegorsk Federal
Security Service, or FSB - the successor organization to the KGB.
The warrants ordered the executions of 4,500 slave laborers from the
White Sea canal, 1,116 inmates of the Solovetskiye camps, and nearly 3,500
other Karelian political prisoners.
"Attached is the list of those sentenced by the Osobaya Troika ... In
all 1,116 men in Solovetsky prison are ... to be shot, "reads the death
warrant, dated Oct. 16, 1937. It was marked "Top Secret" and sent from the
Leningrad Oblast NKVD to a "Comrade Matveyev."
This November 1937 document responds to orders issued by a 'troika'
court of the NKVD to execute 1,116 people. The author, a Capt. Matveyev,
reports the successful execution of 1,111 people; the document describes
the other five as either having been sent elsewhere or as having died in
custody before execution.
On Nov. 10, 1937, Matveyev sent back confirmation to a "Comrade Garin"
that all but five of the executions had been carried out, with explanations
as to the fate of those five. One of the five owed his lucky break to
having died before the execution date.
Memorial and the Medvezhyegorsk city administration have compiled a list
of all of the victims, complete with dates and places of birth.
On Wednesday, Kashtanov was one of the first to receive that list -
describing the contents of trenches unknown for decades, yet just 17
kilometers from his office.
"We have the beginnings of their biographies and relatives are coming
forward - they still have fading photos, memories of those they lost," said
Kashtanov, as he drove the barely paved highway leading to the graves.
Kashtanov said that the names of those who actually pulled the triggers
in October and November in 1937 were erased from - or never added to - the
files in the archives.
"There is no law that would punish them now, so they could come forward
with impunity. But likely, they will never be known," said Kashtanov.
"Besides, how could any law punish them in ways that their consciences -
God willing - haven't already?"
*********
From jove@xxxxxxxxxxx Sat Jul 19 23:42:24 EDT 1997
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 1997 10:53:08 CST
Message-ID: <199707181449.HAA08600@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "M.V. Markoff" <jove@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Stalin-Era Graves
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Dva primechanija:
1. Do stalinskogo "bol'shogo terrora" byl eshche *leninskij* "krasnyj
terror", ob'javlennyj eshche v nachale 1918 g. Sovetskaja vlast' s samogo
nachala stojala na terrorizatsii *shirokix mass* naselenija. Otmechaju eto,
t.k. i v Rossii, i na zapade eshche s XX S'jezda KPSS dejstvuet chetkaja
ustanovka vygorazhivat' Lenina i ego soobshchnikov, valja vinu za ubijstva
*tol'ko* na Stalina (eto obstojatel'stvo konechno nikak ne vygorazhivaet
poslednego).Massovyj terror neotdelim ot sovetskogo stroja, i eto privodit
k zakljucheniju, chto sovetskaja vlast' v svoej sushchnosti byla vlast'ju
*zavoevatelej* (maskirujushchajasja pod "narodnuju"). Chingiz-xanu ne bylo
zhalko ubivat' mnogije tysjachi iz zavoevannyx narodov, chtoby dobit'sja ix
povinovenija. V chem raznitsa?
2. Zaxoronenij takix, kak pravil'no ukazyvaetsja, ogromnoe chislo, po vsej
strane. Vsjakij, kto kak libo opravdyvaet sovetskij stroj, tem samym prini-
maet i na sebja moral'nuju otvetsvennost' za te merzosti, chto tvorilis' v
zavoevannoj internatsionalistami Rossii vse eti desjatiletija. Te, komu
dorogi Lenin, Stalin, *dostizhenija* stanovjatsja idejnymi souchastnikami
genotsidnogo rezhima. Esli oni po natsional'nosti russkije - to togda oni
moral'no souchastvujut v ubijstve *sobstvennogo naroda*. Evrej, opravdy-
vajushchij gitlerizm, ubivavshij ego narod -- urodstvo i koshchunstvo, i v
obshchem -- nevozmozhen v dejstvitel'nosti. Takzhe dolzhno byt' i dlja
russkix v otnoshenii "rodimyx partii i pravitel'stva".
.
