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By Ben Aris in St Petersburg
Story Filed: 26/09/2002
TELEGRAPH.CO.UK
London, UK
More than 60 years after the bloodiest purges of Stalin's rule, Russian
human rights campaigners are digging into their country's past, uncovering
evidence which may at last prove what local people have long believed - that
a forest outside St Petersburg is an enormous mass grave.
A group called Memorial began the search six years ago after research
suggested that a three-mile square of forest near the Rzhevsky artillery
range was the likeliest site for a mass grave.
It is thought that the NKVD, Stalin's secret police, may have killed as many
as 30,000 people, including thousands of children, and buried them in
unmarked pits near the town of Toksovo, 20 miles north of St Petersburg.
More than 50 shallow graves containing human remains have been uncovered so
far. Twenty skulls have been dug up, most with a single hole at the back.
"Nearly all the skulls have a bullet hole in the back of the head which
matches the .45 calibre of military issue pistols of Stalin's era," said
Irina Flige, the director of Memorial's historical research department.
Records show that more than 60,000 residents of St Petersburg, then known as
Leningrad, where shot during the Stalin years - 40,000 in the 1937-38 purges
alone. But it has remained a mystery where the the victims were buried.
Only one cemetery in St Petersburg is known to contain a few thousand
victims who were shot in prison, but the bodies of the rest have never been
accounted for.
Memorial has decided not to exhume the bodies as it is still petitioning the
FSB, the successor to the NVKD which later became the KGB, to admit that the
remains are Stalin's victims.
"The FSB have denied that mass executions were carried out here and denied
that there is any information in their archives that could prove otherwise.
The FSB still identify with the NVKD and still refer to themselves as
Chekisti," said Mrs Flige in a reference to a Russian nickname for secret
policemen.
The discovery of the mass grave has awakened painful memories for families
of the victims.
Irina Bulat was two when her father, a university professor, was shot in
1937. Two years later her mother was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in
the Far East labour camps of Magadan.
"They came one night and arrested my father. He was in prison for six months
then a commission of five men arrived one day from Moscow and after a
20-minute hearing sentenced him to death. He was shot the same day," said
Mrs Bulat.
Her life was then plunged into chaos as she was moved from her parents' home
to an orphanage for the children of "enemies of the people".
Her mother survived but they were not reunited until 1955, when Stalin's
victims were rehabilitated and they were given a one-room apartment in
Leningrad.
Mrs Bulat was never sure what had happened to their father. She was told by
the FSB that he had been shot on June 30, 1937, as a "brigadier general of a
terrorist organisation" planning to assassinate Stalin but "place of
execution not known".
Memorial and Mrs Bulat are convinced that her father is one of the victims
in the Rzhevsky mass grave. She said that in her father's academic resident
block, where she was born, every family on every floor ended up either being
shot or sent to the gulags.
Memorial plans to bring in experts to confirm how the victims were killed
and has approached the FSB asking for the land, which belongs to the Defence
Ministry, to be designated a memorial site.
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