“The condemned were brought by car to a forest. There, deep pits were dug and the prisoners were told to lay down face down. After that they were shot”. So read the notes of the interrogation of NKVD executioner Mikhail Matveyev, who personally executed 1111 prisoners from the notorious Solovki island camp in Karelia in the Russian Far North. It took him four days to execute the whole group.
The Moscow Times: How a Gulag historian fell victim to Russia’s dark past
Yury Dmitriev is a Karelia historian who has devoted the last 30 years to ensuring that the history of the Soviet Terror is known, and that the unmarked graves of countless victims honoured.
