Talk:Sandarmokh

todo: more names in WP


I've added more names to the list of victims, so that the 25 represented approximate to the three categories mentioned by Dmitriev when he drew up the lists: the lost transport from Solovik; locals detained to make up execution quotas; and prisoners and "special settlers" working for the White Sea canal and its enterprises.

This also covers a wider period from October 1937 to April 1938.

Information has now been gathered about more than five thousand of the 9,500 shot at Sandarmokh.

John Crowfoot (talk) 17:03, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

Article neutrality
141 Finnish Americans? How is this in any way "notable"? Might as well put "7500 Russian-Soviets" in the article then. — Preceding unsigned comment added by RomanK79 (talk • contribs) 09:37, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Mention of Stalin, Yury Dmitriev & co
This entry in its earlier form seemed to adopt a false type of "neutrality".

The signatures of Stalin, Molotov and the Great Leader's other henchmen are clear to see on the execution and arrest lists for different parts of the country. When local Party bosses or the NKVD wanted to raise their quotas for executions and arrests, Stalin approved this enthusiasm.

Yet his name was not mentioned anywhere in the entry until now!

The other person absent from this entry is the formidable Yury Dmitriev, an orphan brought up in a Soviet military family. For years in the 1980s and the 1990s he scoured the land looking for tell-tale signs of the Stalinist killing fields. It was a joint expedition between Memorial in Karelia, which he heads, and St Petersburg Memorial that finally found Sandarmokh. Krasny Bor was also identified by Dmitriev that same year.

This is history, it is based on declassified Stalin-era documents and, in this case, the human remains of those murdered at Sandarmokh. If anyone is curious how these horrible orgies of execution were carried out, they could read the chapter about Niyazov, one such pre-war executioner in Lev Razgon's memoirs.

John Crowfoot (talk) 05:07, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Methods of execution at Sandarmokh
It is often incorrectly said of Soviet mass executions, or assumed, that they were carried out by firing squad.

The firing squad is a romantic image -- think of Goya! -- and a practical way of easing the conscience or nerves of those taking part in such an execution. Which of our bullets killed the man? We can't be sure.

For the Soviet regime and, later, the Third Reich, this method of execution was the exception, not the rule. Neither of those regimes, as we know, had much concern for the tender conscience or weak nerves of its subordinates.



From early days, onwards the Soviet method of quick despatch was to dig a trench and then, standing immediately behind the convicted person, shoot them at point blank range in the back of the head.

In the West, we are familiar with this type of mass execution, whereby tens and hundreds could be rapidly killed, from the early stages of the Holocaust in 1941 on the occupied territory of the USSR. We are less aware, it seems, that this was how tens of thousands were killed in the Soviet Union a few years earlier during the Great Purges of 1937 and 1938 - although the location and excavation since the perestroika years of such "killing field-burial sites" has provided ample proof of such execution methods.

Descriptions of how it all took place are rarer, but they do exist: the blood- and brain-spattered clothing of the executioners, the bottles of vodka they drank during or after the event to keep themselves going.

There is one vivid account of such an executioner and his story in Lev Razgon's uniquely well-informed memoirs of those terrible years (see chapter two, "Niyazov" in Lev Razgon, True Stories -- Memoirs of a Survivor, Souvenir Press: London, 1997, pp. 21-34.

So -- please! -- no more "firing squads" when we are talking or writing about the Lenin or Stalin years in the USSR.John Crowfoot (talk) 06:22, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

Neutrality of section on Victims and Executioners challenged
I have removed two phrases from my addition to this website.

Failing to contact the person who objected - he has no email address on Wiki but declares himself a Stalinist - I wonder how other readers of this entry react to this section.

"Execution by firing squad", I have discovered this morning, is used for at least one of the notable Ukrainian victims, shot and buried at Sandarmokh. That has now been corrected.

John Crowfoot (talk) 09:38, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

I have now read advice on When to Remove and When not to Remove such a tag:

"Some neutrality-related templates, such as (associated with the conflict of interest guideline) and  (associated with the neutral point of view policy), strongly recommend that the tagging editor initiate a discussion (generally on the article's talk page), to support the placement of the tag. If the tagging editor failed to do so, or the discussion is dormant, the template can be removed"

The tagging editor did not initiate a discussion or explain on this page what specifically he objected to. There has been no discussion of this section since it was tagged. As of this moment, therefore, I am removing the tag.

John Crowfoot (talk) 14:40, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

Relevance of the prosecution of Sandarmokh researchers
twice deleted the mention about "highly controversial sexual abuse probe against Dmitriyev", one of the main Sandarmokh investigators, although the source indicates that this persecution and the controversial recent “excavations” in Sandarmokh are "links in the same chain". In order to remove this information, more serious arguments are needed than a personal opinion about “relevance”.--Nicoljaus (talk) 06:44, 5 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Ah, look again, I reverted my own edit minutes later. But... no, the onus is on you to defend added information, not the other way around. Beyond My Ken (talk) 06:50, 5 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I was a little rushed, I'm sorry.--Nicoljaus (talk) 06:54, 5 September 2019 (UTC)

Useful article in The New York Times
[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/world/europe/russia-historian-stalin-mass-graves.html He Found One of Stalin’s Mass Graves. Now He’s in Jail.] April 27, 2020. A long article detailing the contemporary controversy surrounding Sandarmokh. This could easily be used to remove some of the weaker sources in the article. For the to-do-list of anyone... --Pudeo (talk) 12:17, 29 April 2020 (UTC)