Exhuming the Bodies of Soviet Terror
2001; University of California Press; Volume: 75; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1525/rep.2001.75.1.89
ISSN1533-855X
Autores Tópico(s)Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration
ResumoSince the demise of the Soviet regime in the late 1980s, much has been written about the mass graves of victims of the so-called Stalinist Terror that have been uncovered all over the Soviet Union. Graves have been found in and near many Russian cities: Moscow (Donskoy Monastery, Butovo, Kommunarka) and Leningrad (Levashovo), Novgorod (Borovichi), Iaroslavl, Kursk, Tula, Lugansk, Voronezh,Medvezhegorsk (Sandormokh), Vorkuta, Cheliabinsk (Golden Mountain), Tomsk (Kolpashevo),Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Gorno-Altaisk, and on the Kolyma Peninsula; in Kazakhstan, near Alma-Aty; in Lithuania, near Vilnius; in Belorus, near Minsk (Kuropaty); in Ukraine, near Kiev (Bykivnia) and Donetsk (Rutchenkovo Field), in Poltava and Vinnytsia. There are wide-ranging estimates of both the number of graves and the number of bodies. Thus, in Kuropaty, a forest near Minsk, by a conservative estimate no fewer than fty thousand victims lie buried. Between one hundred fty thousand and a half a million, claimed a local activist, archaeologistZenon Pozniak. (He went by howmany bodies the area could potentially have held.) ‘‘This is a country built on bones,’’ said Oleg Golovanov, coordinator for the grave discovery project forMemorial, a grassroots organization devoted to commemoration of terror victims. Some people hoped that uncovering the bodies would constitute the proof— the historical and legal evidence—of a state-perpetrated mass murder. Still more importantwere the symbolic meanings of these eVorts. For civil rights activist Alexander Mil’chakov (whose eVorts beginning in 1988 led to the uncovering of secret burial places in the center ofMoscow, forcing the oYcials of state security to release documentary evidence: the execution lists from1937–1938), the search for the bodies stood both for ‘‘the recovery of lost memory’’ and for ‘‘putting together the slaughtered nation.’’ According to a Moscow newspaper, in Kolyma, an area in the far north that formed a natural prison camp, ‘‘the permafrost preserves [the bodies] intact.’’ ‘‘Only frost on their beards. Otherwise they are just like living people,’’ said a local party oYcial in 1988. The image has obvious religious connotations: imperishable, like the saints’ bodies, the Kolyma corpses mark the site of a twentieth-century martyrdom. The dead bodies were also invested with political symbolism: the reform government sought legitimacy in the uncovering of the victims of the old regime. In April 1990, in a gesture of signi cant political impor-
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