TOKSOVO, Leningrad Region -- Human rights group Memorial says it has discovered what could be the secret burial site of about 30,000 St. Petersburgers killed during Josef Stalin's Great Terror of 1937-38.
After a month of digging, members of Memorial's St. Petersburg branch have found 20 sets of bones in a forest near the town of Toksovo, 30 kilometers north of St. Petersburg, and believe that many thousands more could be buried in a mass grave covering 2 square kilometers.
"The little round hole in the back of this skull shows where the bullet that killed this teenage boy entered," Memorial member Miron Muzhdaba said last week, as he removed some human bones from a meter-deep pit.
"Most of the approximately 20 skulls we have found here in the last month have similar holes in the same part of the head," he said, adding that the bullets had been fired into the nape of the neck -- the typical execution method in the Soviet Union.
"The bullet holes mostly match the .45 caliber of the military-issue Colts used by the NKVD," Muzhdaba said.
The NKVD secret police, the predecessors of the KGB, were responsible for carrying out summary sentences and executions of so-called enemies of the people during the Great Terror.
As Muzhdaba spoke, artillery shells exploded in the surrounding forest, the site of an army firing range that has been in use since the end of the 19th century.
"The range made this area very convenient for the NKVD," Muzhdaba said. "The executions were carried out as secretly as possible. The NKVD hoped the firing on the range would somehow hide the murders."
The families of those who were shot were usually told that their loved ones had been sentenced to 10 years in prison without the right to send letters, he said.
Using information from people who lived in nearby villages during the 1930s, Memorial searched for about five years before finding the grave site in August.
The rights group tracked witnesses down by placing advertisements in local newspapers. Memorial said villagers remembered how every night black vans, known as chyornye voronki, or black ravens, arrived at the range and stopped with their headlights on. Terrified residents would then hear random shots.
The Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor organization to the NKVD and KGB, either ignored Memorial or withheld information when the group demanded to know where victims of the Great Terror were buried. The St. Petersburg FSB did not comment last week on the discovery of the grave.
Witnesses told Memorial that the black vans were most active in 1937 and 1938. Between Aug. 5, 1937, and Nov. 16, 1938 -- the period officially known as the Great Terror -- Soviet-era records show that 39,488 people from St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad, and the Leningrad region were executed.
The killings are also known as the Yezhovshchina, after NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov, who, along with Stalin and Leningrad Communist Party boss Andrei Zhdanov, launched the campaign of terror. The Yezhovshchina followed a purge centered in Leningrad after the assassination of Zhdanov's predecessor, Sergei Kirov, in 1934. Between 1930 and 1936, almost 7,000 people vanished from the city.
People were taken from their homes, often in the middle of the night, to the NKVD's headquarters at 4 Liteiny Prospekt -- today the headquarters of the St. Petersburg city police and the local branch of the FSB. Many of the victims were executed in the building's cellars, and Memorial believes that their bodies were dumped at the only other known mass grave in the St. Petersburg region, near the village of Levashyovo.
Irina Flige, director of Memorial's historical branch, said the FSB used to claim that all victims of the purges were buried at the Levashyovo site, which was discovered in 1992. But KGB questioning of those who drove the chyornye voronki in 1937 and 1938 indicated that a maximum of 8,500 people were taken there. "This information leads to the conclusion that there were other places where victims were executed and buried," Flige said.
Flige believes most of the remaining 30,000 victims of the Great Terror were buried at the Rzhevsky firing range near Toksovo. These people were likely to have been driven there and shot on the spot, she said.
As well as the human remains, Memorial has come across other indirect evidence that the Rzhevsk range was used as a mass grave -- including official documents and aerial photos showing tire tracks in a part of the testing ground that is now overgrown with trees and shrubs. Flige said, however, that more investigation needs to be carried out. So far, nine skeletons have been sent for examination at a forensic laboratory, which will determine the age and sex of the dead, as well as the year they died and the cause of death.
Muzhdaba said the remains could not belong to Nazi victims because the German army did not reach this area in World War II. "Most of the remains that we have found were piled on top of each other. There are at least several thousand people buried here," he said, adding that no signs of any clothes worn by the dead, except the remains of shoes, have been found.
Ida Slavina, now 80, is one of the many St. Petersburgers who lost relatives in the purges. In February 1938, her father, Ilya Slavin, 53, a law professor, was executed after being accused of plotting to kill Zhdanov.
Her mother, Esfir, 52, was arrested in April of that year for being the wife of an enemy of the people and exiled to Kazakhstan. Ida, who was 16 at the time, was left in St. Petersburg on her own.
"Before the war, most people wore special badges indicating how well they were prepared to defend the country," Slavina said in a telephone interview last week. "My father practiced at a firing range so that he could wear the badge of a Voroshilov sniper," she said.
Almost all the staff of the Leningrad State and Law Institute, where her father worked, were purged and the institute was closed, she said.
"They needed to destroy the law in order to organize lawlessness," Slavina said.
"Those were terrible times," she said. "Most of the population was still under the influence of propaganda and believed that there were real enemies of the people. Even when we stood in long lines to deliver parcels to our fathers and mothers, many of us seemed to believe some kind of mistake had been made with our own relatives, but that the other victims really had done something bad.
"I was completely sure my parents, who used to sing communist songs to me as lullabies, were innocent," she said.
During the interview, she started to sing some of these lullabies but struggled to hold back her tears.
Slavina said she had contradictory feelings in 1954 when her father was rehabilitated, and "everybody who had not said a word before started saying what a good man he was."
Slavina said she has seen her father's NKVD file and knows that he was executed in the NKVD buildings in St. Petersburg, but she has no idea where he was buried.
"Although my dad died only a few months after his arrest, they kept lying to me that he was alive until 1955," Slavina said.
"None of the archive documents I saw had any information about his grave," she said.
Many of the 100 or so Memorial members and volunteers who participated in the excavations at Toksovo lost relatives during Stalin's purges.
"My great-grandfather, who was a priest, was a victim of the repression in 1937," Muzhdaba said. "It's quite possible that he is buried at the Rzhevsky range."
"I shiver when we drive along the road leading to the range," Muzhdaba added. "It's crazy to imagine what the people in those vans felt, realizing that they were on the way to their death."
Flige said Memorial has sent another request to the FSB for official information on the Toksovo grave.
"If we receive a positive answer from them, we'll just make this place a memorial and stop the excavations," she said. "If not, we'll have to continue our work next summer and find a way of proving what is there."
After a month of digging, members of Memorial's St. Petersburg branch have found 20 sets of bones in a forest near the town of Toksovo, 30 kilometers north of St. Petersburg, and believe that many thousands more could be buried in a mass grave covering 2 square kilometers.
"The little round hole in the back of this skull shows where the bullet that killed this teenage boy entered," Memorial member Miron Muzhdaba said last week, as he removed some human bones from a meter-deep pit.
"Most of the approximately 20 skulls we have found here in the last month have similar holes in the same part of the head," he said, adding that the bullets had been fired into the nape of the neck -- the typical execution method in the Soviet Union.
"The bullet holes mostly match the .45 caliber of the military-issue Colts used by the NKVD," Muzhdaba said.
The NKVD secret police, the predecessors of the KGB, were responsible for carrying out summary sentences and executions of so-called enemies of the people during the Great Terror.
As Muzhdaba spoke, artillery shells exploded in the surrounding forest, the site of an army firing range that has been in use since the end of the 19th century.
"The range made this area very convenient for the NKVD," Muzhdaba said. "The executions were carried out as secretly as possible. The NKVD hoped the firing on the range would somehow hide the murders."
The families of those who were shot were usually told that their loved ones had been sentenced to 10 years in prison without the right to send letters, he said.
Using information from people who lived in nearby villages during the 1930s, Memorial searched for about five years before finding the grave site in August.
The rights group tracked witnesses down by placing advertisements in local newspapers. Memorial said villagers remembered how every night black vans, known as chyornye voronki, or black ravens, arrived at the range and stopped with their headlights on. Terrified residents would then hear random shots.
The Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor organization to the NKVD and KGB, either ignored Memorial or withheld information when the group demanded to know where victims of the Great Terror were buried. The St. Petersburg FSB did not comment last week on the discovery of the grave.
Witnesses told Memorial that the black vans were most active in 1937 and 1938. Between Aug. 5, 1937, and Nov. 16, 1938 -- the period officially known as the Great Terror -- Soviet-era records show that 39,488 people from St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad, and the Leningrad region were executed.
The killings are also known as the Yezhovshchina, after NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov, who, along with Stalin and Leningrad Communist Party boss Andrei Zhdanov, launched the campaign of terror. The Yezhovshchina followed a purge centered in Leningrad after the assassination of Zhdanov's predecessor, Sergei Kirov, in 1934. Between 1930 and 1936, almost 7,000 people vanished from the city.
People were taken from their homes, often in the middle of the night, to the NKVD's headquarters at 4 Liteiny Prospekt -- today the headquarters of the St. Petersburg city police and the local branch of the FSB. Many of the victims were executed in the building's cellars, and Memorial believes that their bodies were dumped at the only other known mass grave in the St. Petersburg region, near the village of Levashyovo.
Irina Flige, director of Memorial's historical branch, said the FSB used to claim that all victims of the purges were buried at the Levashyovo site, which was discovered in 1992. But KGB questioning of those who drove the chyornye voronki in 1937 and 1938 indicated that a maximum of 8,500 people were taken there. "This information leads to the conclusion that there were other places where victims were executed and buried," Flige said.
Flige believes most of the remaining 30,000 victims of the Great Terror were buried at the Rzhevsky firing range near Toksovo. These people were likely to have been driven there and shot on the spot, she said.
As well as the human remains, Memorial has come across other indirect evidence that the Rzhevsk range was used as a mass grave -- including official documents and aerial photos showing tire tracks in a part of the testing ground that is now overgrown with trees and shrubs. Flige said, however, that more investigation needs to be carried out. So far, nine skeletons have been sent for examination at a forensic laboratory, which will determine the age and sex of the dead, as well as the year they died and the cause of death.
Muzhdaba said the remains could not belong to Nazi victims because the German army did not reach this area in World War II. "Most of the remains that we have found were piled on top of each other. There are at least several thousand people buried here," he said, adding that no signs of any clothes worn by the dead, except the remains of shoes, have been found.
Ida Slavina, now 80, is one of the many St. Petersburgers who lost relatives in the purges. In February 1938, her father, Ilya Slavin, 53, a law professor, was executed after being accused of plotting to kill Zhdanov.
Her mother, Esfir, 52, was arrested in April of that year for being the wife of an enemy of the people and exiled to Kazakhstan. Ida, who was 16 at the time, was left in St. Petersburg on her own.
"Before the war, most people wore special badges indicating how well they were prepared to defend the country," Slavina said in a telephone interview last week. "My father practiced at a firing range so that he could wear the badge of a Voroshilov sniper," she said.
Almost all the staff of the Leningrad State and Law Institute, where her father worked, were purged and the institute was closed, she said.
"They needed to destroy the law in order to organize lawlessness," Slavina said.
"Those were terrible times," she said. "Most of the population was still under the influence of propaganda and believed that there were real enemies of the people. Even when we stood in long lines to deliver parcels to our fathers and mothers, many of us seemed to believe some kind of mistake had been made with our own relatives, but that the other victims really had done something bad.
"I was completely sure my parents, who used to sing communist songs to me as lullabies, were innocent," she said.
During the interview, she started to sing some of these lullabies but struggled to hold back her tears.
Slavina said she had contradictory feelings in 1954 when her father was rehabilitated, and "everybody who had not said a word before started saying what a good man he was."
Slavina said she has seen her father's NKVD file and knows that he was executed in the NKVD buildings in St. Petersburg, but she has no idea where he was buried.
"Although my dad died only a few months after his arrest, they kept lying to me that he was alive until 1955," Slavina said.
"None of the archive documents I saw had any information about his grave," she said.
Many of the 100 or so Memorial members and volunteers who participated in the excavations at Toksovo lost relatives during Stalin's purges.
"My great-grandfather, who was a priest, was a victim of the repression in 1937," Muzhdaba said. "It's quite possible that he is buried at the Rzhevsky range."
"I shiver when we drive along the road leading to the range," Muzhdaba added. "It's crazy to imagine what the people in those vans felt, realizing that they were on the way to their death."
Flige said Memorial has sent another request to the FSB for official information on the Toksovo grave.
"If we receive a positive answer from them, we'll just make this place a memorial and stop the excavations," she said. "If not, we'll have to continue our work next summer and find a way of proving what is there."