Krasny Bor is a wooded area, not far from

Petrozavodsk Petrozavodsk (russian: Петрозаводск, p=pʲɪtrəzɐˈvotsk; Karelian, Vepsian and fi, Petroskoi) is the capital city of the Republic of Karelia, Russia, which stretches along the western shore of Lake Onega for some . The population ...

, the capital of

Karelia Karelia ( Karelian and fi, Karjala, ; rus, Каре́лия, links=y, r=Karélija, p=kɐˈrʲelʲɪjə, historically ''Korjela''; sv, Karelen), the land of the Karelian people, is an area in Northern Europe of historical significance for ...

, in northwestern Russia. As with Krasnaya ploshchad (Красная площадь) in Moscow—today known in English as

Red Square Red Square ( rus, Красная площадь, Krasnaya ploshchad', ˈkrasnəjə ˈploɕːətʲ) is one of the oldest and largest squares in Moscow, the capital of Russia. Owing to its historical significance and the adjacent historical build ...

but with a name originating, from earlier Russian usage, as the "Handsome" or "Beautiful" Square—Krasny Bor means the "Beautiful (or Handsome) Grove". The Karelian instance of this common Russian toponym has become widely known, thanks to the efforts of Yury A. Dmitriev, as ''The Forest, Red with Spilled Blood'', one of Stalin's killing fields of the late 1930s.

Identifying the buried victims

In 1997 a killing field and burial place for

NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union. ...

executions during Stalin's

Great Purges The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Nikolay Yezhov, Yezhov'), was General ...

was identified at Krasny Bor and then thoroughly investigated by the historian Yury A. Dmitriev, the head of the human rights organisation

Memorial A memorial is an object or place which serves as a focus for the memory or the commemoration of something, usually an influential, deceased person or a historical, tragic event. Popular forms of memorials include landmark objects or works of a ...

in Karelia. The burial site covers an area of approximately 350 by 150 metres. According to execution reports in the former KGB archives for Karelia, 1,193 people were shot and buried there: 580

Finns Finns or Finnish people ( fi, suomalaiset, ) are a Baltic Finnic ethnic group native to Finland. Finns are traditionally divided into smaller regional groups that span several countries adjacent to Finland, both those who are native to these ...

, 432

Karelians Karelians ( krl, karjalaižet, karjalazet, karjalaiset, Finnish: , sv, kareler, karelare, russian: Карелы) are a Finnic ethnic group who are indigenous to the historical region of Karelia, which is today split between Finland and Russi ...

, 136

Russians , native_name_lang = ru , image = , caption = , population = , popplace = 118 million Russians in the Russian Federation (2002 ''Winkler Prins'' estimate) , region1 = , pop1 ...

and 45 persons of other nationalities. The shootings took place from 9 August to 15 September 1937 and from 26 September to 2 October 1938. The Finnish victims were targeted by the

Finnish Operation of the NKVD The Finnish Operation of the NKVD was a mass arrest, execution and deportations of persons of Finnish origin in the Soviet Union by the NKVD during the period of Great Purge (1937–1938). It was a part of the larger mass operations of the NKVD wh ...

. In an interview with Yury Dmitriev recorded in May 2015 he said that through work in the archives the identity of all those shot at Krasny Bor had been established with a high level of certainty. For comparison, roughly half of those shot at

Sandarmokh Sandarmokh (russian: Сандармох; krl, Sandarmoh) is a forest massif from Medvezhyegorsk in the Republic of Karelia where possibly thousands of victims of Stalin's Great Terror were executed. More than 58 nationalities were shot and bur ...

have been identified.

A place of remembrance

On 31 October 1998, the memorial cemetery ''Krasny Bor'' was opened, a companion site to the large and growing complex at

. A Day of Remembrance is marked each year at Krasny Bor on 30 October, the traditional Political Prisoner's Day in the USSR. On 12 October 2017 three Moscow writers — Ludmila Ulitskaya, Olga Drobot and Marina Vishnevetskaya — visited Krasny Bor after joining other supporters of Yury Dmitriev that morning in the corridor of the Petrozavodsk courthouse where his trial continued in closed session. In the absence of Yury Dmitriev, then held at Detention Centre No 1, the annual Day of Remembrance took a different form in 2017: an official part, with dancing and singing, and an "unofficial" protest during which Dmitriev's daughter Katerina and others read aloud the names of the hundreds of victims from the lists compiled by her father.

Publications

* Yury A. Dmitriev (2000) - ''The Forest, Red with Spilled Blood'' (Bor, krasnoj ot prolitoj krovi), 214 pp. Petrozavodsk.Volume about Krasny Bor killing field, edited by Dmitriev, 2017 reprint
* Yury A. Dmitriev (2002), (with ), ''The Karelian Lists of Remembrance: Murdered Karelia, part 2, The Great Terror'' (in Russian), 1,088 pp. Petrozavodsk. Also available onlin
«Поминальные списки Карелии, 1937–1938: Уничтоженная Карелия, часть 2. Большой террор»
The Lists contain over 14,000 names.

References

External links

The Dmitriev Affair website

Russia's Necropolis of Terror and the Gulag: a select directory of burial grounds and commemorative sites
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Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

Great Purge Massacres in the Soviet Union Political repression in the Soviet Union NKVD Capital punishment in the Soviet Union Forests of Russia Monuments and memorials in Russia Cultural heritage monuments of regional significance in the Republic of Karelia

Identifying the buried victims

A place of remembrance

Publications

See also

References

External links