On these days 83 years ago, in the Sandarmokh wooded tract in Karelia, the death machine operated with particular cruelty: executioners with rabid zeal killed people to serve the authorities on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the so-called October Revolution. From October 27 to November 4, 1937, the largest group of prisoners—1111 people—was executed by firing squad here.
People were exterminated in execution of the notorious resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) “On Anti-Soviet Elements.” This very document, adopted in August 1937, gave impetus to the most massive “purge” in Soviet society. “Enemies of the people” were sought both at large and behind bars, in concentration camps.
The cases of the Ukrainian political prisoners were consolidated into “Case No. 103010-37 of the operational unit of the Solovetsky Prison of the GUGB NKVD of the USSR on 134 Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.” “The Solovki prisoners were transported by sea to the port of Kem, from there by rail to the town of Medvezhya Gora (Medvezhyegorsk since 1938), and placed in the pre-trial detention center of the White Sea-Baltic Camp. From there, the convicts were brought to Sandarmokh in bonds and shot,” explains the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance. The name of the “Stakhanovite” executioner, who had to work literally without rest on those days, is known—Mikhail Matveev.
Among the victims of those autumn executions in Sandarmokh were over 300 Ukrainians or people of Ukrainian origin—the neoclassicist poet Mykola Zerov, the creator of the Berezil Theater Les Kurbas, the playwright Mykola Kulish, the writers Valerian Pidmohylny, Pavlo Fylypovych, Oleksa Vlyzko, Valerian Polishchuk, Hryhorii Epik, Myroslav Irchan, Marko Voronyi, Mykhailo Kozoris, Oleksa Slisarenko, and Mykhailo Yalovyi, the historians Matvii Yavorsky and Serhiy Hrushevsky (brother of Mykhailo Hrushevsky), the scholars Mykhailo Pavlushkov, Vasyl Volkov, Petro Bovsunivsky, and Mykola Trokhymenko, the Dutch-born creator of the USSR Hydrometeorological Service Oleksiy Wangenheim, the Minister of Finance of the Ukrainian SSR Mykhailo Poloz, and many others. “These were people who would have created priceless spiritual treasures, the possession of which would have put us on par with other civilized nations. But the shots of the dimwitted, semi-literate executioner Matveev—the executor of a foreign, profoundly hostile Russian communist power—changed the course of our history,” writes Vasyl Ovsienko, a former political prisoner and historian of the dissident movement.
Afterward, this terrible place in Karelia was forgotten for a long time. It was not until the summer of 1997 that members of the international society “Memorial,” Veniamin Iofe and Yury Dmitriev, found numerous human remains in the Sandarmokh tract.
The Russian authorities have not forgiven Yury Dmitriev, the head of the Karelian “Memorial,” for exposing this terrible crime. In December 2016, a criminal case was opened against him for the production of child pornography. Dmitriev was charged over nine photographs found on his computer, in which his adopted daughter was depicted unclothed. The historian claims that he photographed the sickly girl unclothed to monitor her physical development and to report to the guardianship authorities. On September 29 of this year, the Supreme Court of the Republic of Karelia sentenced Yury Dmitriev to 13 years in a maximum-security penal colony. According to human rights defenders, the case was fabricated for political reasons. “The reason is not only his many years of work perpetuating the memory of the victims of Soviet terror. Sandarmokh became a memorial site, a Memorial of international significance. People came here from the former Soviet republics, Ukraine, and the Baltic states, as well as from beyond the borders of the former USSR, from Poland. The Days of Remembrance showed again and again that mass terror was not a ‘glitch’ in the Soviet system but its very foundation. A connection between history and the present was felt here: in 2015, Yury Dmitriev spoke here about the war in eastern Ukraine. Perhaps this became the ‘trigger,’” states the International Society “Memorial” in a statement.
In total, about 7,000 people of 60 nationalities and nine religious denominations were executed by firing squad in the tract in 1937.