Sandarmokh

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

Memorial to Ukrainians executed at Sandarmokh.

Sandarmokh (Russian: Сандармо́х; Karelian: Sandarmoh) is a forest massif 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) from Medvezhyegorsk in the Republic of Karelia and the execution and burial site of thousands of victims of the Great Purge. Nearly 10,000 people of 60 ethnicities were executed and buried there during a 14-month period in 1937 and 1938.

Many were from the Solovki prison camp in the White Sea, crowded into a barge that was long thought to have been 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.

Discovery and Remembrance

In 1997 thanks to years of effort in the archives by Memorial and on the ground in Karelia by Yury A. Dmitriev, the last resting place of more than 9,000 people was finally discovered at a location subsequently 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 Research Centre in St Petersburg.

Since 1997 monuments have been erected around the site to commemorate the many victims of this killing field, individually and as representatives of particular nations and cultures and an international annual Day of Remembrance has been held there every 5 August. 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 and Yury Dmitriev, the association's leader in Karelia, can once again be named and remembered individually.

According to the documents found by Memorial in the archives of Russian Federal Security Service in Arkhangelsk, there were people of 58 nationalities.

Ukraine declared 2012 as "Sandarmokh List Year" in reference to the thousands of Ukrainian intelligentsia who were executed because they inspired the people of Ukraine, filling them with pride and strength.

Notable victims

• Nikolai Durnovo, Russian linguist
• Hryhorii Epik, Ukrainian writer
• Nikolay Hrisanfov (fi:Krisun Miikul), a Karelian writer
• Mykola Kulish, Ukrainian writer, educator, journalist, playwright
• Les Kurbas, Ukrainian theater director
• Valerian Pidmohylny, a Ukrainian writer
• Mykhailo Poloz, a Ukrainian politician, diplomat, statesman, and participant of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
• Kalle Vento, Finnish journalist (fi:Kalle Vento)
• Mykhailo Yalovy, Ukrainian writer, publicist, playwright
• Mykola Zerov, Ukrainian poet
• Father Peter Weigel, Volga German priest
• 141 Finnish Americans who had immigrated to the USSR and were shot and buried in Sandarmokh by the NKVD are listed by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, in their book In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage (2003).
• 127 Finnish Canadians were also shot and buried there.

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. Neither of those regimes, as we know, had much concern for the tender conscience or weak nerves of its subordinates, the usual reason for disguising which bullet actually killed the target of a firing squad.

From early days onwards, the preferred Soviet method of quick despatch was to dig a trench and then, the executioner standing immediately behind the convicted person, shoot the victims at point blank range in the back of the head. This was the gruesomely renowned "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.

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. He also published, to the indignation of their descendants, the names of the members of the troika which rubber-stamped decisions to execute (the accused were not present at these sessions, no one defended their rights) and of the execution squad leaders.

Publications

• Yury A. Dmitriev (1999), Sandarmokh, the Place of Execution (in Russian), 350 pp. Bars Publishers: Petrozavodsk.
• Yury A. Dmitriev (2002), The Karelian Lists of Remembrance: Murdered Karelia, part 2, The Great Terror (in Russian), 1,088 pp. Petrozavodsk.

See also

• Krasny Bor Forest, Karelia
• Category:Peoples killed and buried in Sandarmokh (Russian Wikipedia)

External links

• Пам’яті жертв соловецького розстрілу Template:Uk icon
• Known victims (6,403 names), query result Template:Ru icon
• Also see Krasny Bor (in English and Finnish), with acknowledgements to the Karelian Republic's Ministry of Culture.