Press Release, 3.10.2022

Photo: The cover of the book “The Place of Memory Sandarmokh” picturing a memorial stone with an inscription “People, Don’t Kill Each Other” at the place of mass executions in Sandarmokh, Karelia

The second volume of Yuri Dmitriev’s book “The Place of Memory Sandarmokh”, which includes essays and memories of victims of Stalin’s repressions of 1937 – 1938 who were shot and buried in mass graves in Sandarmokh, Karelia, documents on executions, photos of memorials, as well as the names of Sandarmokh victims, will be launched in the Moscow office of Yabloko on 5 October at 18.30.

Sandarmokh is one of the largest places with mass graves of Stalin’s victims in Russia.

Anatoly Razumov, editor, head of the Returning of the Names Centre at the Russian National Library, one of the founders and historian of the Levashovskaya Pustosh memorial, and Emilia Slabunova, deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Republic of Karelia and member of the Federal Political Committee of the Yabloko party, will speak about the book.

The event will be broadcast in YouTube (https://youtu.be/Kf3cLhGSTsQ ).

The author of the book, Yuri Dmitriev, is a Russian historian, head of the Karelian Memorial human rights society, and a researcher of the burial places of victims of Stalin’s repressions. In the late 1990s, Dmitriev organised a search expedition that discovered and investigated the mass graves of victims of political terror in the Sandarmokh forest tract in the Medvezhyegorsk region of Karelia, as well as the Krasny Bor forest in the Prionezhsky region of Karelia.

Yuri Dmitriev has been imprisoned since 2016. In 2020, he was convicted and sentenced to 13 years in prison. In December 2021, the period of his imprisonment was extended to 15 years. Russian historians, human rights activists, lawyers and other independent observers consider the Dmitriev case to be politically motivated.