Sandarmokh

The first thing you notice is the quiet. Tall pines stand close together, and the ground underfoot is soft — sand, moss, fallen needles. Light comes down in thin columns between the trunks. Somewhere a woodpecker taps, then stops. And everywhere you look, among the trees, there are small wooden markers, photographs, ribbons, and names. This is Sandarmokh, a forest in Karelia, in Russia's far northwest. It is a cemetery. And for decades, almost nobody knew it was here.

We are close to the settlement of Povenets, at the northern tip of Lake Onega. This is the point where the White Sea–Baltic Canal begins its climb north. That canal was dug in the early 1930s by prisoners of the Soviet labour camp system, known as the Gulag. Many of them worked with hand tools, in brutal conditions. So the land around you is already marked by forced labour before you even enter this forest. Sandarmokh belongs to the same story, but it marks its darkest chapter.

In 1937 and 1938, the Soviet state carried out a campaign of mass arrests and executions. Historians call it the Great Terror. Secret orders set quotas for how many people each region should arrest, and how many should be shot. People were condemned by small commissions, often in minutes, with no real trial. Many were brought to remote places like this one. Here, in this forest, they were shot and buried in pits. Their families were usually told nothing at all.

For almost sixty years, the place stayed silent. Then, in 1997, researchers from the human rights society Memorial found it. The search was led by Yuri Dmitriev, a local historian from Karelia, together with Veniamin Iofe and Irina Flige from Saint Petersburg. They worked from archive documents about executions in the area. Those papers pointed them to this stretch of forest. When they walked here, they saw shallow depressions in the ground, row after row. Each one was a grave.

The numbers are hard to hold in your mind. Research by Memorial indicates that more than nine thousand people were shot and buried here. They came from dozens of nationalities. There were Russians and Karelians, Ukrainians and Finns, Poles, Germans, Georgians, Tatars, Jews, and many others. There were peasants and priests, engineers and poets, factory workers and former officers. Many were local people from Karelia. Others were prisoners already serving sentences in camps nearby. The forest holds more than two hundred burial pits.

Here is something many visitors do not know. Among the dead is a large group of prisoners from the Solovetsky Islands, the camp in the White Sea that people often call Solovki. In the autumn of 1937, more than a thousand of them were taken away by boat and never seen again. For years, their fate was a mystery, and researchers called them the lost transport. The 1997 discovery answered that question. They were brought here, to this forest, and shot.

That Solovki group included some of the most gifted people of their generation. Ukraine remembers many of them as part of the Executed Renaissance — a whole circle of writers, artists, and thinkers destroyed in the 1930s. The theatre director Les Kurbas and the playwright Mykola Kulish were among those killed here. As you walk, you may see a tall Ukrainian cross. It is one of many national memorials that now stand among the pines.

Those memorials are the second surprise of this place. Sandarmokh is not one monument. It is a forest of them. Different countries, regions, churches, and communities have placed their own markers here. There are Orthodox crosses and Catholic crosses, a Polish memorial, Lithuanian and Finnish tributes, stones carved with Muslim and Jewish symbols. Each one tries to say the same thing in its own language: these were our people, and we have not forgotten them.

But the most moving markers are the smallest. Look at the trunks of the pines. Families have nailed or tied photographs to them, with a name, a date of birth, and the date of death. Some photos are faded by rain and snow. Some are new, wrapped in plastic. Often the date of death is the same on many of them. These are personal graves, chosen by grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The exact burial spot of each person is unknown, so families pick a tree.

Near the entrance stands a stone with a short inscription. It says, in Russian, "People, do not kill each other." There is also a small wooden chapel. Every year, usually in early August, people gather here for the Days of Remembrance. The date links to the summer of 1937, when the mass operations began. Visitors come from across Russia and from abroad. They read names aloud, light candles, and leave flowers on the sand.

The story of Sandarmokh did not end with its discovery. Its meaning is still contested. In 2018 and 2019, the Russian Military Historical Society carried out excavations here. They promoted a different version: that the graves might hold Soviet prisoners of war killed by Finnish forces during the Second World War. Historians and Memorial researchers rejected this, pointing to the archive records of 1937 and 1938. Yuri Dmitriev, who found the site, was later prosecuted and sentenced to a long prison term. His supporters say the case was linked to his work.

So when you stand here, you are not only in a place of the past. You are in a place where memory itself is still argued over. That is why the photographs on the trees matter so much. Each one is a family's quiet statement of what happened. Treat the site as you would any cemetery. Keep your voice low, stay on the paths, and do not move the objects that people have left.

Take a moment now to look around you. Notice how the light falls on the moss. Notice the slight dips in the ground, the places where the earth sank long ago. Read one name on one tree — just one — and say it to yourself. Think of the person who chose that tree, and the long journey they made to stand here, as you are standing now.

As you walk back towards the road, listen again to the pines. The wind moves in their tops, and the forest feels almost ordinary. That ordinariness is part of what happened here. For sixty years, this was just a forest. Now it carries thousands of names. When you leave, you take a few of them with you.