Counting Putin's Victims

The Soviet Union took an intensely discriminatory attitude to its history. What the regime wanted remembered, it magnified beyond all recognition; what it wanted forgotten, it erased. The Battle of Stalingrad, for instance, was endlessly propagandized by the Soviets; whereas the First World War, a conflict that likely took the lives of over two-million Russians, was all but erased from official accounts. The Great War was begun under Tsar Nicholas II, before the Bolsheviks came to power, and therefore had no place in modern memory

The USSR finally collapsed in 1991, and for a decade historians delved into massive archives of the Soviet state’s massive archives. But Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, and the need to forget returned. The depositories were closed off. Requests for access to documents were denied, pressure applied to those who published. Consider the case of Yuri Dmitriev.

In 1996 Dmitriev, exploring a forest in Karelia, in northwest Russia, discovered a series of mass graves. Thousands of dead, the backs of their skulls perforated by single bullets. It was, as Dmitriev went on to discover, the final resting place of more than 9,000 people targeted in the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. They were rounded up in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere, forced to work in the Solovki “corrective labor camps”—monasteries converted to concentration camps on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea—then brought by barge to the killing fields of Sandarmokh.

Over many years of work, Dmitriev produced a massive catalog of the names of the dead. Not just their names but their birthplaces, residences, livelihoods, marriages, the dates of their arrests, and their sentences. He also published the identities of their executioners and those of the functionaries who rounded them up and pronounced false charges against them.

It was this latter work—naming and shaming the men responsible for these crimes—that has irritated the new Soviet apologists. Dmitriev went on to catalog other acts of mass murder by the state: the 8,000 victims of Karelian extra-judicial tribunals; the 2,000 condemned by Moscow “dvoikas,” or two-man panels, on trumped-up political charges; and many more.