Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 14 – Moscow has
deployed archaeologists at Sandarmokh, the site in Karelia where more than 10,000
of Stalin’s victims were buried, in a transparent effort to rewrite history a
la Katyn by suggesting that those buried there were killed by the Finns during
the Winter War rather than by the Soviet dictatorship throughout its
history.
Sandarmokh attracted attention
beginning in the 1990s thanks to the heroic efforts of investigators like Yury Dmitriyev
and Sergey Koltyrin to call attention to Stalin’s crimes. The authorities have locked both of them up on
faked charges, but that hasn’t been sufficient to obscure what they proved.
Consequently, as the Region.Expert
portal reports, Moscow has brought in new forces, in this case the Russian
Military-Historical Society whose members are now engaged in further
excavations of the site not to provide additional confirmation of what
Dmitriyev and Koltyrin found but to disprove it (region.expert/sandarmokh/).
On
its webpage, the Society admits as much (rvio.histrf.ru/activities/news/item-6524);
and now, working with the Investigative Committee, it says it is “testing the
hypothesis” advanced by Moscow historians in 2016 that “at Sandarmokh are
buried not only (or even not so many)
victims of Soviet repressions as of ‘prisoners of Finnish concentration
camps.”
Region.Expert points out that
“what we are observing here is the open falsification of history of the kind
imperial propagandists love to accuse their opponents. This obviously is a
direct order from the Kremlin to wipe out the ‘inconvenient’ memory about
Soviet terror and replace it with ‘victorious’ myths.”
“The empire can continue to exist
only with the help of these myths,” the portal continues; “but when Karelia
restores its sovereignty, it will also restore an adequate study of history.”
In the meantime, others are working
hard to do just that, not only by helping to defend Dmitriyev and his
colleagues against the false charges that Russian officials have brought
against them but also establishing a Facebook page that keeps track of what these
officials and their archaeologist co-conspirators are doing (facebook.com/groups/sandarmokh/).
That group now has almost 300
members, is updated almost every day, and is yet another example of the ways in
which the Internet makes it far more difficult for the Kremlin to put out an
unchallenged lie about the past.
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