Sandarmokh
Sandarmokh (Сандармох; Karelian: Sandarmoh) is a forest massif 12 km (7.5 mi) from Medvezhyegorsk in the Republic of Karelia where an unknown number, estimated in the thousands, of victims of Stalin's Great Terror were executed.
Only in 1996, thanks to the efforts of Veniamin Ioffe [ru] (1938–2002), co-chairman of the Memorial research centre in St Petersburg, documents were found in the archives of the Arkhangelsk department of the Federal Security Service (FSB) throwing light on the subsequent fate of the "first Solovki transport".
After years of work on the ground in Karelia by Yuri Dmitriev, this documentary evidence pointed the way to the identification on 1 July 1997 of the Solovki prisoners' last resting place and that of another 5,000 executed individuals.
Three hundred personal plaques and memorials have been erected around the site since 1997 to commemorate the many victims of this killing field, both individually and as representatives of particular nations and cultures,[4][9][10] and an international Day of Remembrance has been held there every 5 August since 1998.
In 2010, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church led the mass for the slain victims of Stalin at Sandarmokh, just as he and his predecessor Alexy II have done, every year since 2007, at the Butovo killing field near Moscow.
[11] Today, thanks to the Memorial Society, to Veniamin Ioffe and Yury Dmitriev, over 5,000 of the dead of Sandarmokh can again be named and remembered individually, at the place where they lie buried.
[14] "Alongside hard-working peasants, fishermen and hunters from nearby villages", wrote Yury Dmitriev,[15] "there were writers and poets, scientists and scholars, military leaders, doctors, teachers, engineers, clergy of all confessions and statesmen who found their final resting place here."
Cross-examined while under arrest in 1939, the chief executioner Mikhail Matveyev said he made the victims lie face down in the prepared trench and then shot them.
[27] Thanks to the efforts of Ivan Chukhin, founder of Memorial in Karelia, a national deputy to the Supreme Soviet (and the Duma) and Yury Dmitriev's mentor, the names of the members of the troika which rubber-stamped decisions to shoot a list of individuals – the accused were not present at these sessions, no one defended their rights – and of the execution squad leaders became known by the mid-1990s.
She talked to Finnish historians of the Second World War; Irina Flige of the Memorial Society and Sergei Kashtanov, head of the district administration where the killing fields were found.
Russian newspapers and television had talked of "thousands" of POWs being shot by the Finns and buried at Sandarmokh: speaking on the record to Yarovaya, Verigin was more cautious and spoke of dozens and hundreds.
In early March 2020, a local court decided to release him due to a terminal illness, however, the prosecutor challenged this decision and Koltyrin died in a prison hospital on 2 April 2020.
