Press Release, 2.12.2020

The Directorate of the Investigative Committee for Karelia admitted that during the so-called expeditions of the Russian Military Historical Society (RVIO), established by Vladimir Putin’s decree and chaired by ex-Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, to the place of mass burial of Stalin’s victims in Sandarmokh the remains of twenty people were exhumed, and not seventeen, as reported previously. This is indicated in the response of the Investigative Committee to the appeal of the deputies of the Legislative Assembly of Karelia from Yabloko – Emilia Slabunova and Ivan Gusev.

The Russian Military Historical Society made two expeditions to Sandarmokh, trying to prove that this mass burial is not a burial place of Stalin’s victims shot in Sandarmokh during Great Terror in 1937-1938, but was a place of burial of prisoners of war – the Red Army soldiers and officers – kept in Finnish concentration camps and killed and buried there in 1941-1944. The legitimacy of the expeditions raised many questions from journalists, human rights activists and historians. Many historians and researchers regard the situation around Sandarmokh as a political campaign by the Russian authorities targeted at silencing or revising the history of Stalin’s reprisals, indicating that the purpose of searching for the remnants of Soviet prisoners of war at the site of the memorial cemetery of Stalin’s victims (when the names of many  victims were found out and confirmed) represented shifting the emphasis, replacing and ousting the memory of the state’s terror against its citizens.

In August 2018, Emilia Slabunova, Yabloko MP in the Legislative Assembly of Karelia and then Chair of the Yabloko party, applied to the Karelian Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Public Prosecutor General’s Office asking to check on the lawfulness of the actions of the Russian Military Historical Society in conducting search and exhumations in the memorial place. However, the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the court, where Slabunova appealed against the inaction of the prosecutors, supported the Russian Military Historical Society and did not conduct any checks on the legality of or control over the works.

According to the Russian Military Historical Society, in the period from August 25 to September 5, 2018, two burial pits were opened, followed by the exhumation of the remnants of five people, and on August 16, 2019, the remnants of twelve more people were found and transferred for examination to the Investigative Committee of Karelia.

The deputies from Yabloko asked to report on the results of the forensic medical examination of the remnants. They also asked whom the remnants were later transferred for burial and what was done to memorialise them, as required by law.

The Department of the Investigative Committee, referring to the results of expert studies, that have been still unpublished, as well as the procedural decisions taken, announced their intention to bury the remains in the Medvezhyegorsk region of Karelia. Artur Parfenchikov, head of the Republic of Karelia, also informed about this in response to a similar appeal from Yabloko.

However, as follows from Parfenchikov’s answer, the examination did not establish the identities of the killed.

“One shouldn’t be surprised that the identities have not been established,” Emilia Slabunova writes on her Facebook page. “It is only Yury Dmitriyev [imprisoned historian] who has been returning all the names of the victims from oblivion. For him, every person is valuable and he devoted his whole life to returning them to their families and history. The neglect of the heirs of the executioners who are in power today to human life is demonstrated once again by the fact that for 1.5-2.5 years they did not make efforts to find the names of not thousands, but only seventeen people.”

Slabunova also wonders where the remains of three more people came from: “Is this another manipulation or fraud?!”

Emilia Slabunova intends to find out what will be the status of these persons and where their burial will be. “If these were the search operations of the dead servicemen, as it has been continuously emphasised, is it planned to bury them with military honours?” Slabunova writes. She also sent a request to the Ministry of Defence, but has not received a response yet.

Earlier, Chairman of the Yabloko party, Nikolai Rybakov, made a proposal to create a public coalition Sandarmokh, which would continue the work of historian Yuri Dmitriyev who had been working on identification of the victims and their executioners but was imprisoned on false accusations. On 30 October, 2020, on the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Reprisals, a large delegation from Yabloko made a special visit to Karelia so that to pay tribute to the victims of the Great Terror buried in Sandarmokh – one of the largest b