Krasny Bor Forest, Karelia

The Karelian instance of this common Russian toponym has become widely known, thanks to the efforts of Yury A. Dmitriev, as The Forest, Red with Spilled Blood, one of Stalin's killing fields of the late 1930s.

[1] In 1997 a killing field and burial place for NKVD executions during Stalin's Great Purges was identified at Krasny Bor and then thoroughly investigated by the historian Yury A. Dmitriev, the head of the human rights organisation Memorial in Karelia.

According to execution reports in the former KGB archives for Karelia, 1,193 people were shot and buried there: 580 Finns, 432 Karelians, 136 Russians and 45 persons of other nationalities.

In an interview with Yury Dmitriev recorded in May 2015 he said that through work in the archives the identity of all those shot at Krasny Bor had been established with a high level of certainty.

[6] On 12 October 2017 three Moscow writers – Ludmila Ulitskaya, Olga Drobot and Marina Vishnevetskaya – visited Krasny Bor after joining other supporters of Yury Dmitriev that morning in the corridor of the Petrozavodsk courthouse where his trial continued in closed session.