He Found One of Stalin's Mass Graves. Now He's in Jail.
He Found One of Stalin’s Mass Graves. Now He’s in Jail.
The discovery by Yuri Dmitriev, after years of searching, “has clearly made some people very uncomfortable,” his daughter says.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/world/europe/russia-historian-stalin-mass-graves.html
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The forest at Sandarmokh in the northwestern Russian region of Karelia, where thousands of victims of Stalin were executed.Credit...Davide Monteleone for The New York Times
Andrew Higgins
By Andrew Higgins
April 27, 2020
Updated 8:39 a.m. ET
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A few days later, the curator of a museum near Sandarmokh, who had supported Mr. Dmitriev’s work and had also been jailed on pedophilia charges, died in a prison hospital from an unspecified illness.
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“This whole case is a horror,” said Natalia Pakentis, a former ballet dancer in Petrozavodsk who credits Mr. Dmitriev with helping find out that her long-lost grandfather had been executed at Sandarmokh in 1938. “Millions of people were killed and they all have families. How can we now pretend that none of this really happened?”
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Yet, until he discovered the mass graves at Sandarmokh, few of the killing fields had been found. Even those that were known about — like an N.K.V.D. execution ground in the Siberian village of Kolpashevo, discovered in 1979 when a nearby river dislodged more than 1,000 mummified corpses — had often been covered up by officials or overshadowed by war memorials celebrating Soviet heroism.
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But, he added, their number has been vastly exaggerated by “so-called democratic forces who want to politicize” history and obscure the crimes of Russia’s enemies during World War II. Mr. Kilin, in a telephone interview, accused “extreme liberals” of constantly raising the number of Stalin’s victims in an effort to “denigrate our past and darken our future.”
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“Everyone understands what is going on here,” Mr. Tsvibel said. “This whole case is absurd. It not only has a political background, but is a political hit job.”
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