Sandarmokh in 2024: Travel Notes

Russian authorities have been methodically trying to undo the efforts to preserve the memory of mass executions in Sandarmokh, Karelia, during the Great Terror. Our volunteer reports on her recent trip there.

It takes about fifteen minutes to get from Medvezhiegorsk, a small city in Karelia in the North of Russia, to Sandarmokh. Taxi drivers do not ask me why do I need to go to this remote place in the woods. If anything, they complain that not as many people come to visit Sandarmokh anymore.

Sandarmokh is a memorial cemetery, an execution site of the Great Terror in the 1930s. The first mass burials were discovered by Yuri Dmitriev, Irina Flige and Veniamin Iofe in 1997. Since then, over five thousand names have been established of people who were killed in Sandarmokh in the late 1930s.

Search for burials has stopped: Yuri Dmitriev is in prison, Sergey Koltyrin, the director of Medvezhegorsk local history museum, who supervised the maintenance of the memorial complex and did a lot to preserve the memory of the victims, died in prison. 

Having not been to Sandarmokh for almost a year, I am startled to see construction work that seems to be carried out near the parking lot and the wooden chapel; there are, however, no workers in sight although I came on a weekday.

Another novelty is a monument dedicated to “victims of the Finnish occupation” who were allegedly buried in Sandarmokh. No evidence has been found so far to corroborate the allegation that Soviet prisoners of war were killed here in 1941–1944. The version was proposed in 2016 by historians of Petrozavodsk State University, also in Karelia, who backed up their assumption with the fact that there were two Finnish camps for Soviet prisoners of war in Medvezhiegorsk. In 2018, the Russian Military History Society (RVIO), an organization with close ties to the Kremlin, carried out a search expedition in Sandarmokh, during which the remains of five people who died from gunshots to the head were discovered. A year later, during the second expedition of the RVIO, the remains of sixteen more people were found.

The expeditions were widely criticized for violations of research norms as well as lack of authorization to conduct search operations in Sandarmokh. No evidence was found upon expert examination to support the Soviet POW version, but that did not stop the federal Investigative Committee to open a criminal case in 2020 about “genocide of Soviet citizens in Karelia” during World War II.

I pass through the locked gate and walk from monument to monument, reading the names that I know already so well, listening to the silence of Sandarmokh, a silence that is very different from that of other places. A quote from Pushkin comes to mind: “all flags will visit us…” How bitter! People of over fifty ethnicities were executed here.

Here, in the cemetery, among national and personal monuments, everything seems to be the same as it was on August 5 last year, on the remembrance day of victims of state terror: wreaths and baskets with withered flowers and faded ribbons. I watch the bright May sun shining on some monuments and others, illuminating the names that have been saved from oblivion.

On my way out I read the words inscribed on a rock brought from Solovki and displayed as a monument. “People, do not kill each other”. How far are we now from being true to that.