How search crews in Latvia find and bury hundreds of Soviet soldiers every year

There are roughly a dozen organizations working in Latvia today to find the remains of Soviet soldiers killed during the Second World War. Every year, excavation crews find and bury between 200 and 500 people, almost all of whom died at the very end of the war, in the winter of 1944 and the spring of 1945, when Soviet troops attacked the Germans and their allies in Latvia. Almost none of the dead can be identified. To learn more about this search and find out what happens to the recovered remains, Meduza correspondent Andrey Kozenko met with some of the people still digging today.

The bulldozer scooped up another chunk of earth and stopped suddenly. There were human remains caught in the dirt. The work crew telephoned City Hall, which alerted the police, whose officers guessed that it was an old burial site. The excavator had stumbled onto a mass grave of Soviet soldiers killed during the Second World War.

This grisly discovery was made on April 23, 2018, not far from the small settlement of Pampāļi, almost 150 kilometers (about 90 miles) southwest of Riga. The construction crew was clearing the way for a new road, but that project has been suspended, and the police have called in people from organizations created to find, identify, and rebury the remains of soldiers killed during the war.

Local officials have given the groups two months (May and June) to find and exhume the remains, and then it’s back to building the road. The people in these organizations work from morning until night on weekends, and they’re all volunteers. In Latvia, there are about a dozen of these groups. They have names like “Patriot,” “Memory,” and “Brotherhood.” The biggest of them, with a few dozen people on staff, is “Legend.”

A man named Talis Eshmits heads the group “Legend.” Monday thru Friday, he’s an official in Latvia’s Forest Service. On weekends, when the weather permits it, Eshmits leads search operations. This has been his life since the mid-1990s.

“I used to dream of digging up a tank. That’s how it all started,” Eshmits told Meduza. “Only I realized quickly that I was headed in the wrong direction. All that military hardware is nonsense. I pulled two tanks out of the bogs… We found a plane and pulled it out, and there was a soldier’s body inside. It’s in moments like that when you start wondering if you’ve got all your priorities straight.”

Sometimes the searches are conducted on the basis of archival findings, but more often than not they happen like the one in Pampāļi. Even in Riga, renovation crews accidentally dig up old mass graves. Across the country, human remains often turn up when construction workers start laying a new foundation. At one local farm, bodies were unearthed when planting new apple trees. “But our main source is the older generation of people who witnessed so much and remember it to this day. We call their stories legends, and that’s how our group became known as ‘Legend.’ The only thing is: 80 percent of these legends are true,” Eshmits says.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, search groups like Legend competed with “black diggers” — people looking for weapons, medals, and other artifacts to sell to the highest bidder. For example, from the 1930s until 1942, special cartridges were supplied to the Sturmbrigade Reichsführer-SS bearing the symbol of these units. Today, one of these bullets fetches 50 euros on the open market. In recent years, however, there have been almost no “black diggers” in Latvia; the police have cracked down.

Of course, the search crews also find the remains of German soldiers and the Latvian legionnaires who fought alongside the Nazis. These people are buried at their own cemeteries, which also exist in Latvia. Search organizations take the position that they needn’t feud over people who died more than 70 years ago; they just need to identify whomever they can and rebury them properly.

“What do you think this was like for us? It was one totalitarian regime against another. In a second, at the blow of a whistle, by command, how many people from our country took a side in this mess?” Eshmits says. “That’s why our parliament adopted a law making all veterans equal. They’re all victims of the war. Yes, there are [pro-Russian] veterans’ organizations [working in Latvia] that are unhappy with this state of affairs, but the law’s the law.”

* * *

The road outside Pampāļi cuts through a large, empty field. It starts near Auniņi, a village with just a few homes and maintenance buildings. From here, it’s about three kilometers (almost two miles) to Pampāļi, and it’s 25 kilometers (15 miles) to Saldus, the main town in the region.

The search crews are well equipped. They’ve even got their own small caterpillar excavator, as well as hand-held metal detectors, shovels, different-sized spades, and brushes — all borrowed or purchased with their own money. As the excavator digs up the roadbed, trying to stay on the shoulder, several members of different search groups (they don’t compete against each other and they often work together) run metal detectors over the earth lifted up in the bulldozer’s teeth.

“In late January 1945, the front line ran right through this place,” says Victor Thor, who volunteers for one of the search groups. “From the south, right out of that forest, two Red Army divisions attacked from both sides: the 7th Guards and the 8th Guards, the Panfilov Division. They pushed the Germans to the northeast. It was relatively calm in February, and then the divisions attacked through the field where we’re standing now. They reached the forest to the north and went in, and that’s where the Germans launched their counterattack. There was low visibility in the forest, and the soldiers didn’t have artillery support because of the trees. Plus there were problems with their ammunition — this was the spring of 1945 and a large part of these supplies went straight to [the assault on] Germany. The Germans were even able to surround some regiments of the 8th Division, until the 7th came to the rescue and broke the encirclement.”

To this day, nobody knows how many Soviet soldiers died here. Search groups started their work immediately after the war and continued looking throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Crews are still finding people’s remains all the time.

Outside Pampāļi, the three dozen people on these search crews don’t stop working even for a minute. They unearth five unexploded grenades, a few shovels, a smoking pipe, a candle made from a bullet casing (they even found some of the cloth wick still inside), a battered helmet, a little penknife, two Soviet three-kopeck coins, and many small pieces of human bones. They collect the bones in a small box. Most importantly, they chance on several medals awarded for courage. The medals are numbered, which means the recipients can be identified — unlike most of the soldiers found in the dirt.

“It’s easier with the Germans; they wore dog tags,” explains Viktor, who’s on one of the search crews. “Soldiers in the Red Army had capsules in which they were supposed to keep a little slip of paper recording their name and unit number, but most didn’t fill out these papers, probably out of superstition. And they were practical, using the capsules to hold a needle and thread. As a result, a lot of them haven’t been identified.”

In the middle of the road, the bulldozer digs out a hole about half a meter (almost 20 inches) deep, and search crew members climb down and start working with small shovels and brushes. Within a few minutes, it becomes clear that they’ve found at least eight Soviet soldiers buried in a mass grave. One crew member carefully places the skulls and bones into special bags, while others check the area with metal detectors, looking for personal items that might help identify the discovered remains.

To date, Eshmits says search groups working in this field over the years have unearthed the bones of 145 Soviet soldiers.

The remains are transferred to a special warehouse, and then a long bureaucratic process begins to determine a proper ceremony for these individuals. A bilateral agreement between Russia and Latvia regulates military burials, and it’s within this framework that search groups notify the Latvian “Committee of Brotherly Cemeteries” (which is authorized to implement the agreement on the Latvian side), the Russian embassy in Latvia, the Russian Defense Ministry, and archival organizations in both countries. The remains are then buried (usually with an official ceremony) either at the cemetery for Soviet soldiers here, not far from Pampāļi, or at another active cemetery in the village of Ropaži.

* * *

Ropaži is a lovely little village southeast of Riga. It’s home to a couple of shops, a cafe, a church, and a post office. The three-story apartment buildings have Soviet-era paneling, and the standalone homes sport tiny, shipshape gardens. On the outskirts of Ropaži, you’ll find one of the last cemeteries in Latvia where Soviet soldiers are still buried. The ceremonies have taken place on the first Saturday of every May since 1997.

The cemetery — a square area with a low fence — is remarkably small. A sign at the entrance reads, “Brāļu kapi” (Brotherly Cemetery). Inside, there are two rows of tombstones with inscriptions about how many people were buried in certain years: for example, 432 unknown and still unidentified Red Army soldiers between 2001 and 2009, one hundred and thirty-nine unknown soldiers in 2011 (plus another 14 men found that year who were identified, and whose headstones now bear their surnames), 132 soldiers in 2016 (only three of whom were identified), and so on.

“In the 1980s, there was supposed to be a monument built here,” explains Talis Eshmits. “There were battles here, too. But the Soviet Union ended, and nobody built the monument. This land was empty throughout the 1990s. We’d already started our search operations, and we were looking for a place to rebury the people we found. The big cities turned us away; they didn’t want their cemeteries to get any bigger. But here they said okay.”

On May 5, around 11 in the morning, Russia’s ambassador to Latvia, Evgeny Lukyanov, visited the Ropaži cemetery with Belarusian Ambassador Marina Dolgopolova and Azerbaijani Ambassador Javanshir Akhundov. A large bus also delivered a group of elderly women from the “Latvian Association of the Anti-Hitler Warriors’ Coalition,” whose chairperson says their mission includes caring for the military graves and looking after Latvia’s 877 remaining Soviet veterans and survivors of the Salaspils concentration camp. The association strongly opposes any efforts to commemorate those who died fighting with the Nazis (including Riga’s annual “Legionnaires March”), and it condemned an attempt in 2010 to erect a monument to the German prisoners of war who died in Salaspils between 1945 and 1946.

“My father was a soldier in the Red Army. The parents of my girlfriends were exiled from Riga to Siberia during the repressions. My neighbor’s parents were legionnaires. Generally, we can all get together and talk about anything — except the past, and especially when we’re all sitting around the table, having a bit to drink. We’ll never agree here,” one of the women in the “Anti-Hitler Warriors’ Coalition” told Meduza.

The ambassadors took turns giving ceremonial speeches about the need to preserve the memory of the war and the soldiers who died fighting it. A Russian Orthodox priest led the funeral service. More than half a dozen little coffins were on display. They laid to rest the remains of 240 Soviet soldiers found over the past year. Only eight of these men had been identified, and it was often thanks to some small incidental item: a numbered medal, a labeled spoon, an engraved cigarette case. Sometimes, it had been because of where their remains were discovered.

Their names were read aloud.

Sergeant Alexey Beloborodov, born in 1917 in the Irkutsk region, killed on January 24, 1945.

Junior Sergeant Alexey Zhuchkov, born in 1926 in the Oryol region, killed on January 25, 1945. He was awarded the Order of the Great Patriotic War of the first degree (though archival records don’t specify what he did exactly to receive this honor).

Sergeant Vasily Luchinin, born in 1926 in the Dzhambul region of Kazakhstan, killed on August 9, 1944.

Private Alexander Marnevsky, born in 1926 in the Leningrad region, killed on December 29, 1944. He started the war in the Soviet Navy, winning a courage medal for shooting down a German aircraft.

Sergeant Nikolai Ozimov, born in 1922 in the Velikiye Luki Oblast, killed on January 23, 1945. During the war, he was awarded the Order of the Red Star, a military merit medal (for shooting two German soldiers in combat), and a medal for courage.

Private First Class Pyotr Olenin, born in 1916 in Dagestan, disappeared in July 1941.

Private Pyotr Sokovnikov, born in 1916 in the Amur Region, killed on December 24, 1944.

Private Vasily Shtrykin, born in 1925 in the Ryazan region, killed on December 29, 1944. It’s known that he was shot while fighting outside the Latvian town of Tukums. On December 30, 1944 (apparently unaware that he’d been killed), the Soviet military awarded him a courage medal for bringing ammunition to fellow soldiers under fire.

The coffins were lowered into a grave, and sprinkled with fir branches and flowers.

“As you can see, these were completely different people, and they managed to identify only a few of them. The rest are unknown, but the symbol of the unknown soldier exists in many countries and it unites us,” said Russian Ambassador Evgeny Lukyanov.

“We won’t be able to finish this work in my lifetime,” Eshmits announced suddenly and sadly. The next day, he was back at the dig site outside Pampāļi, managing his search crew.

Andrey Kozenko reporting from Pampāļi, Ropaži, and Riga. Translation by Kevin Rothrock.