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By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
The Washington Post, Washington, D.C.
September 24, 2002, Page A16
MOSCOW, Sept. 23 -- After years of fruitless searching, investigators for
a prominent human rights organization have uncovered what they believe to be
one of the major killing fields of Joseph Stalin's Great Terror of the 1930s
at a military firing range outside St. Petersburg.
Volunteers digging at the site discovered human bones last month and have
since turned up more than 50 burial pits, each believed to contain dozens of
bodies. Human rights workers said the initial discoveries might validate
their long-held suspicion that the Rzhevsk artillery range was turned into a
mass grave containing the bodies of some 30,000 men, women and children.
"Children of the people who were executed have been trying to find out
about the fate of their relatives for more than 60 years," said Irina Flige,
director of the research center at the St. Petersburg chapter of the human
rights group Memorial, which was founded to commemorate victims of
repression. "It was a monstrous crime by the Communist regime that is still
being obscured at an official level."
Mass graves have turned up periodically in various places around the
former Soviet Union since it collapsed in 1991. Just this summer, a
Ukrainian chapter of Memorial announced the discovery of 225 bodies of
people apparently killed by Soviet secret police in a monastery near the
western city of Lviv.
These burial sites usually are found by accident or from the efforts of
private groups such as Memorial, not by any organized attempt by the
government to confront crimes of the past. In the most recent case, the
discovery owed to the determination of Flige and her husband, Venyamin Yofe.
About 7,000 people in the region around what was then known as Leningrad
disappeared in Stalin's purges from 1930 to 1936 and nearly 40,000 more were
killed from August to November 1937, the peak of the terror, according to
Memorial. Thousands were buried in a cemetery discovered a decade ago in the
village of Levashevo, but relatives of victims had long believed that
Stalin's executioners took most of the political prisoners to the Rzhevsk
army range in Toksovo, just north of Leningrad, where they were shot and
buried.
In 1998, Yofe, a former dissident who spent three years in a prison camp
in the 1960s, narrowed down the search to a section of the wedge-shaped
range that stretches about 40 miles in length. Four years of searching
failed to yield anything, and Yofe died this year unable to prove his
assertion. Flige continued his work until the first bones were found in
August.
Investigators plan to conduct tests to determine the age of the remains
and intend to continue digging until winter freezes the ground. Ultimately,
a memorial will be constructed at the site. "The legacy of the gulags has
not been overcome in the 21st century," Flige said. "The victims have
remained unknown and unmourned."
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