Posted on 08/24/2003 5:07:46 PM PDT by KayEyeDoubleDee
As Stalin's paranoid purges of the 1930s swept across Russia, NKVD henchmen killed as many as 32,000 Soviet men, women and children at this place in a decade's time, the Russian human-rights group Memorial estimates, based on the testimony of witnesses and written accounts.
They dropped them into shallow unmarked pits at the Rzhevsky artillery range near Toksovo, 20 miles north of St. Petersburg, and left them here to rot, nameless and forgotten.
What lies beneath the mulberry bogs of the Rzhevsky range could be perhaps the single biggest grave of victims of the "Great Terror" ever found in the former Soviet Union. But it appears that the people who died here are a part of a forgotten history Russia would rather not remember.
A year has passed since activists from Memorial - volunteers who have worked for more than a decade to uncover crimes of the communist era - unearthed this burial site: at least 50 graves set just a few paces apart, each containing remains of about 30 people, their yellowed skulls bearing bullet holes that St. Petersburg forensic experts said are telltale signs of NKVD executions.
The Russian government has said nothing so far about the ghastly find.
Irina Flige, head of Memorial's historical department, said this silence is a disturbing symbol of Russia's unwillingness to deal honestly with the ugly side of its recent past.
"It's the kind of history the Russian government doesn't need," Flige said.
Historians believe that as many as 20 million people were executed without trial or perished in the labor camps of the Soviet gulag. In 1937-38, at the height of the purges, as many as 40,000 residents of St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad, were put to death.
A brief political thaw during the presidencies of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin in the late 1980s to 1990s saw some acknowledgment of the brutal legacy of the communist era. Yeltsin's government, for example, acknowledged a mass grave at Levashovo, 15 miles northwest of St. Petersburg, that Memorial said contained 4,000 to 5,000 victims of the purges.
But Flige said Russia has swung back toward a climate of repression since President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel, ascended to power in 2000. Putin, who tends to gloss over many of the disturbing elements of Russia's past, has brought back the Soviet national anthem, unveiled a plaque in Moscow commemorating Stalin, and authorized the Russian Central Bank to issue 500 special silver coins bearing Stalin's portrait.
Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB, the main successor of the NKVD and later the KGB, denies any knowledge of the crime that took place at the firing range decades ago and has been employing Soviet-style tactics to keep the graves cloaked in secrecy, Flige said.
Someone routinely blows up sections of the main road to the grave, making it impossible to navigate by car and forcing activists who work on the site to hike 5 miles through the forest. Several times, armed guards have blocked the road. And when Memorial officials asked the FSB for access to old NKVD archives, the security service refused, saying it has no records of the killings.
"We have nothing to show," Sergei Chernov, head of FSB archives in St. Petersburg, said in a telephone interview this week. "There is nothing to grant access to."
Flige said Memorial, which has unearthed remains of seven people for forensic tests and then reburied them at the artillery range, hasn't got the resources to exhume the remains of all the people it believes are buried there.
She concedes that no lists exist of the people executed at the artillery range. But she believes that the FSB has indirect records of the killings - receipts, maintenance logs, logs of the drivers who brought the victims here.
Witnesses have come forward to help Memorial find the truth.
David Pelganen, 78, lived in a nearby village, now abandoned and overgrown by the spreading forest, in the 1930s. He said cars carrying prisoners Stalin had deemed "enemies of the state" came here night after night, the headlights sweeping over the moss before they would come to a halt by the side of the road.
Then, Pelganen recalled, the lights would go out. There would be several moments of silence, interrupted by sudden gunfire.
Then, he said, the engines would start again, and their taillights would disappear around the corner. "This is evidence," he said. "They really killed people there."
During the Soviet era, people like Pelganen who knew of the killings kept quiet, afraid that the bloodthirsty system might go after them next.
"How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? If during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever was at hand? The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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