In a patch of forest deep in Russia’s north lies a burial site for victims of Stalin’s Great Terror. Between 1937 and 1938, up to 9,000 gulag prisoners were brought here by night, shot in the head, and stacked atop one another inside 236 rectangular pits that had for years been concealed among the trees.
Sandarmokh, as the site is known today, was fated for oblivion until its chance discovery in 1997 by local gulag researcher Yury Dmitriyev, who spent the next two decades documenting the victims. The area is now covered with rusty iron crosses and wooden posts, to which …read more
Source: Protothema
