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THE WORLD
By John Daniszewski, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times, November 18 2002
TOKSOVO, Russia -- Mikhail Pushnitsky, his long gray hair hanging down the
side of his head, jiggled the steel rod in his hand and pressed it down into
the brown soil again and again, until he heard the tell-tale thump. Like a
beating heart in a horror story, the hollow echo of the rod striking bone
lingered in the air: an accusation.
Gingerly using a shovel and the kind of brush for getting snow off a
windshield, he soon exposed a skull, femur and shin bones, all of which had
taken on a rusty hue. For some reason, however, the enamel of the victim's
teeth still shone white.
"As any normal person, the first time I saw this I was shocked," said
Pushnitsky, 55, part of a small team investigating what it says is a newly
discovered Stalinist killing field outside St. Petersburg. "But when you get
to your 20th skull, you get angry. We understand that this is a crime scene,
and through this we have come close to a hideous crime."
"The perpetrators should not be able to get away," added Fyodor Drozdov,
Pushnitsky's colleague rooting in the dirt of the forest. "If we cannot get
the killers, at least let's bring the crime out into the open."
What drives the two men to anger is the tendency of many of their fellow
Russians, and the wider world, to rationalize, doubt or somehow excuse the
state-sponsored killing of tens of millions of Soviet citizens from the
earliest days of the Bolsheviks until the death of Josef Stalin in 1953, and
some even later.
Even as Memorial, a nongovernmental organization that seeks to uncover
crimes of Communist terror and win redress for victims, was announcing its
find of the Toksovo execution grounds after a 14-year search, politicians
were calling for the reinstatement of a monument to one of the chief
killers, Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the first Bolshevik secret police.
The forest near Toksovo, Memorial estimates, could hold the bones of 32,000
people executed from the late 1920s until the late 1930s, on the eve of
World War II. That would make it perhaps the single biggest grave of
Stalinist victims found in the former Soviet Union.
And yet a monument that Memorial erected in St. Petersburg to the victims of
a Communist campaign of terror was defaced in September with the words:
"They should have killed more."
Eleven years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the FSB -- the successor
agency to the NKVD, the KGB and other Soviet secret police agencies -- is
still stonewalling about how many people were killed and exactly where they
are buried, said Irena Flige, head of Memorial's office in St. Petersburg.
It took Memorial 14 years of deduction, investigation and detective work --
initiated by Flige's husband, Veniamin Iofe, a former political prisoner who
died in April -- to find the first remains. They were unearthed Aug. 20 in
these woods controlled by the Ministry of Defense and used as an artillery
firing range since czarist times.
The very secrecy of the killings proves that the Stalinist regime knew the
executions were a crime, something to be kept hidden, Flige said.
Prisoners were loaded into Black Marias in the middle of the night from St.
Petersburg's Kresty Prison and the NKVD's "Big House" headquarters and
driven over a bumpy dirt track to a small access road that led into the
forest. The appearance of this road to nowhere in aerial photographs dating
to the 1920s was the first clue that led Iofe to believe that graves would
be found in this area, said Flige, 42, an anti-Soviet dissident since age
18.
Now that more than 50 graves have been found, she said, there can be little
doubt that this was the NKVD's main graveyard in St. Petersburg during the
1937-38 period known as the Great Terror. In its work there, Memorial has
dug down only about 3 feet. The group presumes that there are many layers
below, but it says it is not interested in disturbing the dead by doing a
complete excavation.
Memorial's knowledge about the grave site is "fragmentary," according to
Flige, because FSB authorities in the region are refusing any detailed
discussion with her group. The FSB is saying only that it has no written
records of a graveyard or of mass executions near Toksovo.
"We interpret this as a problem of crimes against humanity," Flige said.
"Since the FSB is the direct legal heir of both the KGB and NKVD, we believe
their categorical denial of assistance to us should be considered as
concealment of information."
Official Denial
Although she does not know who all the victims are, she strongly suspects
that one is Father Pavel Florensky, a pre-revolutionary Russian theologian,
writer and scientist who refused to surrender his philosophical opposition
to Bolshevism. Documents from government archives show that he was to be
executed in the vicinity of Toksovo in December 1937.
The Defense Ministry, which has jurisdiction over the woods, said it, like
the FSB, knows of no grave site from its records. And now, Flige said, the
military is saying it will not renew a permit for access to the site until
Memorial provides archival evidence for the graves' existence, something --
according to Flige -- that it knows to be impossible.
Meanwhile, an explosion has left a huge crater on the road to the site. Now
it can be reached only by foot or bicycle, she said.
Although Flige suspects that the FSB asked the military to blow up the road,
she says she is not discouraged.
"Nothing will stop us," she said. "We have not stopped our excavations."
Memorial's estimate of 32,000 victims in Toksovo is based on subtraction.
About 40,000 people in what was then Leningrad and its surrounding region
were killed in the Great Terror, but the one known grave of the victims is
believed to hold only about 8,000.
The discovery of the graves has electrified sons and daughters of victims,
now in their 60s and 70s. Their lives were permanently changed after
nighttime visits of the secret police, which meant that their fathers or
mothers -- or both -- were to be consumed by the Stalinist killing machine.
"I want to go to Toksovo and go down on my knees there and take a handful of
earth home in a little bag and keep it on my desk, where I can always look
at it, touch it and maybe talk to it," said Mela Lyubavskaya, 75, who lost
her father -- a devoted party member -- on the night of Feb. 19, 1937, when
she was 10.
Her father, Pavel Lazarevich Bulat, 36, was executed a few months later.
His wife, Nina, was sent to a camp. Mela and her sister, 3, went to
orphanages, where they were raised to detest their disgraced father and
worship Stalin, the constructor and master of the apparatus of terror. It
was an experience shared by millions, none of whom could speak openly about
their pain until decades afterward.
Andrei Dybovsky, a St. Petersburg forensic crime expert, said he examined 12
skeletons from the Toksovo site. Many of the skulls had bullet holes ranging
in diameter from 9 to 11.43 millimeters in the back, which he said would
match the killing style and weapons of NKVD executioners of the time.
The excavations and search for more graves would continue until the first
freeze, then resume in the spring with the aid of archeologists and
geophysicists, Dybovsky said.
The remains that are unearthed are photographed, studied and then put back
into the ground.
Personal Interests
Both Pushnitsky and Drozdov, the volunteer excavators, had personal as well
as historical interest in bringing forth the truth. Pushnitsky's great-uncle
was executed during the Great Terror. Drozdov was born in a Stalinist labor
camp.
Drozdov, 55, a mathematician, said that at the least he would like to see a
sense of shame develop in Russia, where even today prominent people are
often slain but the killers are rarely brought to justice.
"We should make sure that a person asked to do this in the future would
think about how his children and grandchildren will feel about him someday.
"Nobody is shocked that the government ignores this," said Drozdov, who
wants those perpetrators still alive to be prosecuted. "They do not want to
deal with the people who committed this crime."
The difficulty of getting Russia to deal honestly with its past was shown by
the recent proposal, by Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov, to re-erect the statue
of Dzerzhinsky, and by the defacing of the memorial to victims of Communist
terror.
The vandals also drew a swastika and a Star of David on the stone and
painted over verses by Anna Akhmatova about Soviet-era repression.
Memorial's monument to the victims was put in place in early September. It
was formed from a large rock from the Solovetsky Islands, site of one of the
first Communist labor camps beginning in the 1920s.
"We ... felt it was the right time," Flige said, "because the rumors of
having Dzerzhinsky put back up were already circulating."
The toppling of the Dzerzhinsky statue in 1991 outside the KGB headquarters
in Moscow after the failed hard-line Communist coup against Mikhail S.
Gorbachev symbolically heralded the victory of Boris N. Yeltsin, the end of
one-party Communist rule and the demise of the Soviet Union a few months
later.
The fact that Moscow's mayor now wants the statue put back -- purportedly
for its artistic merit -- is seen by many here as a clumsy attempt to curry
favor with President Vladimir V. Putin, who served as a KGB colonel and has
installed many of his former colleagues in important political posts.
As Flige sees it, nothing fundamental has changed in Russia over the last
decade, and the Gorbachev-Yeltsin era was simply one of the periodic thaws
in an overall Russian political climate of repression.
"And that seems now to be coming to an end," she said. "First we get a
president who is an ex-KGB colonel, then we move on to [restoring] the
Dzerzhinsky monument."
Victor L. Masaytis, 76, the son of a Great Terror victim in St. Petersburg,
said he has difficulty understanding what is happening.
"This is blasphemy," he said of the push to reinstall the Dzerzhinsky
statue. "This is utter blasphemy."
Masaytis recalled the night they came for his father: Dec. 5, 1937. His
father was a prominent engineer working on Leningrad's water system.
But in the mad logic of the Great Terror, the father, an ethnic Lithuanian,
was singled out to die for an alleged anti-state conspiracy by Latvians.
Masaytis was 11, and he recalls that he could not keep his eyes open all
night while strange men searched their apartment, standing around, taking
notes and seeking evidence.
"I fell asleep. I did not see my father being taken away," he said, 65 years
after the event.
Instead, Masaytis recalls only "the shadow of a soldier, with a rifle and a
bayonet, standing behind our matte glass door. That image I can remember
very well."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-graves18nov18001442,0,4293263.story?coll=la%2Dheadlines%2Dworld
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