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On 27 October 1937, the Soviet authorities committed one of the most brutal crimes in history – the mass murder of the prisoners of the Solovetsky camp.
Sandarmokh is a forest tract that became the site of mass executions and burials of Stalin’s Great Terror in 1937-1938. It is located 19 kilometres from Medvezhyegorsk on the road to Povenets, in the Medvezhyegorsk district of the Republic of Karelia.
Sandarmokh is one of the largest and most famous burial sites for victims of Stalinist repression. A total of 236 shooting pits have been discovered there, where, according to researchers, the NKVD torturers secretly killed and buried 6241 people. Among those killed in Sandarmokh were special settlers and residents of the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, prisoners of the White Sea-Baltic camp, and people from the largest ‘first stage’ of the Solovetsky camp.
Due to the latter fact, Sandarmokh acquired international significance, as many famous people were imprisoned in the Solovetsky camp: cultural figures, scientists, leaders of political, national and religious movements.
Between 9 and 14 October 1937, the Leningrad ‘troika’ (Solovetsky prison was under the jurisdiction of the NKVD in the Leningrad region), consisting of NKVD chief Leonid Zakovsky, his deputy Vladimir Garin, and regional prosecutor Boris Pozern, handed down 1116 death sentences, reviewing about 200 cases a day. The verdicts in the remaining 84 cases, which probably could not be prepared in time, were delivered on 10 November.
One of the 1116 convicts died in the camp before being sent, and four were transferred to other places on NKVD orders. To carry out the executions, a group of NKVD officers led by state security captain Mikhail Matveyev was sent from Leningrad to Karelia.
At the end of October, those sentenced to death were handed over to Matveyev’s team, after which they were loaded onto a ferry and transported to Kemi, from where they were transferred by rail to the village of Vedmuzhu Gora (Medgora). The NKVD placed 1111 prisoners in the local Belbaltlag detention centre, which was designed for 300 people. The executions were carried out in accordance with the protocols of the ‘Troika’ – one or two protocols per day: 27 October, 1, 2, 3 and 4 November. The prisoners were transported in small groups of 3-5 trips per day in two trucks to the place of execution 19 kilometres from the village.
Beforehand, they were severely beaten and tied up in a special room in the detention centre, while some prisoners were killed during the beatings. On the first day of the executions, one of the prisoners tried to attack the convoy with a knife. After this episode, the prisoners in the isolation facility were also stripped to their underwear. The prisoners brought to the tract were forced to dig large pits more than a person’s height. After that, the NKVD torturers ordered them to lie down in them and killed them with a shot from a revolver in the back of the head. People were laid in several layers in one pit.
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