Memory breaks through

At the beginning of September, a group of teachers and students of the Moscow International Film School, human rights activists, civil activists and cultural figures from Moscow and St. Petersburg visited the Petrozavodsk court, where the trial of Yuri Dmitriev is underway, and the burial sites he discovered. Here is the story of one of the trip participants.

Places of horror - places of memory

A frail elderly man is being led in handcuffs along a narrow corridor of a government institution. Seeing him, those gathered in the corridor begin to applaud, and a childishly awkward and timid smile suddenly appears on his stern face. “Thank you,” he says with only his lips. A thin woman with short blond hair runs up to him with the exclamation “Dad” and the few meters remaining to the door walks next to him, whispering something in his ear. All this lasts a matter of seconds, and the bailiffs and the defendant disappear behind the door. This is what the trial of Yuri Dmitriev, a Karelian historian and local historian, looks like; it seems to be the most important trial in today's Russia.

Dmitriev has been in custody for nine months; the trial, which began in June, is being held behind closed doors in order to “protect the interests of the minor.” Photographs of his adopted daughter found on Dmitriev’s home computer, taken for the guardianship authorities in order to monitor her physical condition, experts invited by the prosecution (already known for, for example, calling the Bible extremist literature, and who admitted during the trial that they did not have the necessary education and license for the preparation of forensic examinations) was considered child pornography, and now Dmitriev faces from 8 to 15 years in prison. All independent experts and human rights activists claim that the accusation is fabricated, and its real reason is Dmitriev’s activities in searching for the remains of victims of Stalin’s repressions.

After a short meeting with the defendant in the court corridor and communication with others who came to support him, we board the bus and go to Sandarmokh - the most famous of Dmitry’s open graves and one of the largest mass graves of Stalin’s terror known to date, along with the Levashovsky wasteland, the Butovo training ground , Katyn and Kommunarka. Judging by archival data, at least 7.5 thousand executed people lie in the forest 180 km from Petrozavodsk and 19 km from the “capital” of the Belbaltlag, the city of Medvezhyegorsk. On the way to Sandarmokh, St. Petersburg historian and long-time friend of Dmitriev Anatoly Razumov talks about the “technologies” of execution (they, like the history of the “first Solovetsky stage,” are described in detail in his article “ The Sorrowful Path. Solovetsky Stages of 1937–1938 ”). To pack the three-ton truck more tightly, people were stacked in layers on top of each other and covered with a tarpaulin. This made the work of the executioners easier - the victims lost consciousness, suffocated, and upon arrival at the scene were unable to resist. To “calm down” those who had such strength left, the convoy had a set with each vehicle - a wooden “mallet” (a club with which they beat the restless on the head, often breaking the skull) and a metal cane with a pointed end (this cane was used to pierce especially obstinate people) . I listen to all this and think that it’s enough to read such a text non-stop on Channel One for at least a week - and the atmosphere in the country will change noticeably.

If you don’t look closely, Sandarmokh is very similar to an ordinary cemetery - a good asphalt entrance and parking for vehicles (all this was built “at the end of the second thaw” in 1997, declared “the year of agreement and reconciliation”; then they were waiting for the arrival of Boris Yeltsin), a large obelisk entrance, a wooden chapel, many crosses or “cabbage rolls” covered with a canopy with photographs and names, and many memorial stones to representatives of different nationalities - in official reports this is called an “international memorial complex.” Grandmother-cashier in a roadside cafe on the highway leading to Sandarmokh, having learned where we were going, said: “I know, of course, it’s beautiful there.” But once you walk around among these crosses for a little while and take a closer look, the resemblance to the cemetery is lost. On the stone at the entrance is written not the usual “Eternal Memory” for such places, but the deafening “People, do not kill each other”; crosses, columns and memorial stones do not stand near graves, but simply in the forest or near moss-covered holes in the ground, and every now and then there are notes on the trees “we are looking for such and such, he was shot at that time.” And something clicks in my head: no, this is not a cemetery, a resting place for the deceased and memory for his loved ones, this is something exactly the opposite - a place of crime and unconsciousness. This quiet and secluded place was not chosen for its beauty and silence: the firing squad was looking for a piece of forest away from the road and housing, so as not to be seen by random witnesses.

This is felt especially poignantly on Badger Mountain, another burial site discovered by Dmitriev. We are going there the day after Sandarmokh, already in a very small group - there is almost no road, from the nearest settlement, the 8th Gateway Village, you need to walk five kilometers through the forest. If Sandarmokh is one of the largest mass graves of the Great Terror, Badger Mountain is one of the largest discovered but not officially recognized cemeteries in Russia. This place doesn’t even look like a cemetery at all, and therefore makes a much more immediate and powerful impression. This is precisely a forest, dotted with pits and hollows that are unremarkable at first glance. Only when you look closely do you begin to see that these hollows are of the correct shape.

This place was discovered not by people, but by badgers. (That is why Dmitriev called it Badger Mountain; in documents it appears as the “cemetery of Sangorodok Belbaltlag.”) When building their labyrinths, badgers tend to pull to the surface from the ground everything that interferes with their path. Near one of these holes at the very beginning of the 2000s, a local hunter (he is the one leading us now), wandering through the forest, discovered first bones and then a human skull. Knowing that Dmitriev had long been looking for a large burial place in these places for prisoners who built one of the most labor-intensive sections of the White Sea Canal, he contacted him and invited him to come and take a look. The bones turned out to be, indeed, the same ones - a study of the area showed that at least 800 people were buried here. Dmitriev and his assistants installed several crosses and two plaques in the forest in memory of those killed and sent a request to local authorities to recognize this place as a memorial cemetery. The place remained untouched; a person rarely sets foot here - only badgers still dig their passages; fresh soil is visible near the holes. The impression of abandonment is reinforced by the knowledge that there are more than one or two such burials in these forests. Along the way, our guide shows a clearing where earth bees have settled; when he and a friend tried to dig up some honey there for testing (earthen bees store honey in underground burrows-nests), they immediately came across human bones. Because of the burials, there are a lot of voids in the ground, the bees inhabit them, nothing surprising, says our companion.

It’s hard not to think that the horror that these places witnessed, which people try to hide by burying and forgetting the way here, breaks out from underground through badger holes and the passages of earth bees, like a memory driven underground and into the subconscious.

It is on Badger Mountain that you understand why names are so important for everyone who is seriously involved in the topic of memory, why “memorialists” are so obsessed with compiling and publishing lists, why reading names turns out to be the most powerful and understandable ritual of resurrecting the memory of those repressed in an increasing number of Russian cities . The fact is that in everyday life we ​​live surrounded by people with names and biographies, and we can fully feel the inalienability of this seemingly self-evident human heritage only by seeing with our own eyes the muteness and unconsciousness of nameless graves and execution pits. Here it becomes clear that compiling lists of names, publishing and reading them is one of the rare cases when the symbolic meaning of an action is equal to the literal one: it is simultaneously a symbolic act of restoring justice, a sacred act, and a naturally necessary act of returning what was taken away.

After all this, Dmitriev’s words in one of the reports about Badger Mountain no longer look like a “special effect” or religious exaltation. “There are so many people there. No one remembered them with a kind word for many years. And when you start to remember them, they respond. Everyone shouts: remember me too! My heart can't stand it."

The main impression of this place is the blatant need to return what was taken away, literally hanging in the air. The work of unearthing these remains, returning their names and posthumously restoring their taken and violated honor is not just a natural, but the only possible reaction to this experience. It is no coincidence that many, having once visited such places, begin to travel here periodically.

The phenomenon of mass graves

But the activities of Dmitriev and his relatively few like-minded people are not just important, from a symbolic point of view, work to restore justice. It was the search for the remains of victims of repression, what Anatoly Razumov calls the work of turning places of horror into places of memory, that in many countries stimulated processes that led to serious social and even political changes. Similar processes took place in many countries; one can recall such different cases as Argentina, Cambodia or Poland, but this is most clearly seen in the example of Spain.

In this country, divided for decades by the memory of the bloody Civil War of 1936-1939 and the subsequent dictatorship of Franco, oblivion and silence about the past became the fundamental model of memory and the foundation of “national reconciliation” after the fall of Francoism. The shortcomings of this model made themselves felt every now and then in outbreaks of terrorism and the rise of separatist sentiments in areas that especially fiercely resisted the nationalists during the Civil War and after, and were especially brutally pacified. This oblivion was broken through precisely by a movement centered around the search for mass graves of nationalist victims, the identification and reburial of their remains.

Moreover, the wave rose and gained strength surprisingly quickly. Until the end of the 1990s in Spain, cases of families searching for the burial places of their loved ones who were executed without trial in the Civil War were local and isolated in nature. In 2000, Madrid journalist Emilio Silva published an article about his grandfather, who was executed by nationalists during the Civil War, drawing attention to the fact that if in Argentina, Chile and Guatemala the state takes responsibility for the crimes of the past and participates in the search and reburial of those repressed, in a long time ago Nothing like this happens in Spain, which has transitioned from dictatorship to democracy. The article caused a heated public debate, and the Association for the Revival of Historical Memory ( ARMH ), founded by him in the same year, united the efforts of historians, human rights activists, civil activists and journalists across the country, concerned about the problem of finding and identifying victims of repression. In its first five years, ARMH performed 60 exhumations, identifying the remains of more than 500 people. But even more important than the actual work of discovering and reburying the remains was the impact of this activity on Spanish society. A painful and unpleasant topic, which the descendants of those killed preferred not to remember, about which newspapers were silent and which politicians avoided, suddenly became open for discussion.

That same energy - “remember me, too!” — was released and the effect exceeded our wildest expectations. The example of ARMH and stories about exhumations in the media and the Internet gave rise to many regional organizations, caused a surge of interest in family history, numerous publications of diaries and memoirs of eyewitnesses, the topic of memory became almost the main one in literature and cinema. “The phenomenon of mass graves,” as historians called it, over the course of several years led to a change in the attitude of the entire Spanish society towards the past: in 2004, conservatives who advocated maintaining the “pact of silence” lost the elections; in 2007, the new government adopted a law on historical memory, in 2008, Judge Baltasar Garzón opened a criminal case into the disappearance of more than 114 thousand people during the Civil War and subsequent dictatorship, demanding that the state exhume 19 mass graves throughout the country. And although this case was not progressed, and the first reburial at public expense occurred only in 2017, it was the process of exhumations by volunteers that prepared the national discussion about the crimes of the Franco regime.

On a special website created by the Spanish Ministry of Justice by government decision, you can find a map of the country indicating more than 2,000 currently known mass grave sites. Those where exhumations have already occurred are marked in red, those where not yet are marked in green. The entire country is literally dotted with these triangles.

This map is especially painful to look at from Russia; the difference in the scale of the problem and its solution is too obvious. It is estimated that about 300,000 people became victims of repression on both sides of the Spanish Civil War - and almost all of the burials have now been found. According to available statistics alone, the number of those executed during the years of Soviet terror, killed or brought to death in prisons and camps, during deportations and living in special settlements ranges from 5 to 7 million people. The “ Memory Map ” project, similar to the Spanish map, created (with state support) by the St. Petersburg “Memorial”, contains descriptions of a little over 400 burial sites out of about 1,200 known. The descriptions of the vast majority of them say: “Safety of burials: not preserved”, “protection status: not included”.

Education of the people

Perhaps a comparison of these two maps provides the most accurate answer to the question of who was disturbed by the Karelian historian excavating burials 80 years ago. He managed not only to find burials in Sandarmokh, Krasny Bor, on Badger Mountain and on the slope of Solovetsky Sekirnaya Mountain - he managed to start a wave. The experience of Spain shows what such a wave is capable of.

According to the director of the Medvezhyegorsk Museum of Local Lore, Sergei Koltyrin, every year more and more people come to Sandarmokh for the days of remembrance on August 5th. Moreover, what is especially important, most of the visitors are not guests from Moscow and St. Petersburg, but local residents. It was the local memory that Dmitriev tried to awaken by grouping names in his books not according to the alphabetical principle, but according to geography.

“The lists are deliberately grouped by place of residence at the time of arrest,” he writes in the introduction to the book “ Sandarmokh Execution Site ,” published in 1999. — Looking for names dear to you, you will be forced to look for often non-existent village councils and forever lost villages and hamlets. Remembering your roots, knowing the history of your family, your clan - this is where the history of the Motherland begins for each of us.”

Connected with this is a very important idea for Dmitriev that it is the memory of ancestors, which presupposes knowledge of the places where they are buried, that makes the scattered mass of the population a people. Then the abstract past becomes personal history, and those who are personally connected to history are difficult to manipulate. In the same 1999 book, the lists are accompanied by letters from relatives asking if the names of their loved ones are there, and with gratitude from those who managed to find theirs. This is not only a tribute to memory, but also a call to awaken it.

The abundance of monuments in Sandarmokh to the Germans, Georgians, Ukrainians, Finns, Poles, Jews, Tatars, Vainakhs and so on, erected by representatives of national communities, was the result of Dmitriev’s completely conscious and purposeful efforts. “What am I doing in Sandarmokh? - Shura Burtin quotes him in the article “ The Hottabych Case ”. - I educate people. I take some people and explain to them: here your brothers were killed and buried. You are one people, only you are alive, and they are dead. Why don’t you, bastards, erect a monument to them!”

And the education worked. The first monuments set in motion a competition of national pride: “These people erected a monument to their dead, but we are worse,” and then the compatriots of the victims began to increasingly trample the road to Sandarmokh, and official delegations also began to come there. People's and national memories began to live independently, regardless of the efforts of Dmitriev or anyone else.

Apparently, this is precisely the reason for the discontent that Dmitriev’s activities caused among the authorities, and, ultimately, the accusations inspired against him. We can say that Dmitriev set himself the task of “reprogramming” the national identity of the Russian population through the awakening of family memory. To put it mildly, a non-trivial task, given that national identity in Russia is traditionally programmed from above. And although the reason for fabricating the case against Dmitriev could well have been the resentment of one of the “spiritual heirs” of the executioners or a personal conflict with the too rough and inconvenient Hottabych, the real reason is the fundamental conflict of the model of existence that his work triggers with the one that is being implanted political system of modern Russia. Having become a work to awaken memory in a state that was not ready to honestly look at its past and condemn crimes against its own people, its activities ultimately could not help but come into conflict with state policy.

A Matter of Awareness

In other conditions, Dmitriev would have been awarded awards and honors - active assistance in the search, state prizes, praise in the press and on federal channels. But this recognition comes to him on a personal level (from the relatives of the victims he found) or from abroad (his only award is the golden Cross of Merit presented by the Polish Ambassador). In the conditions of modern Russia, it is quite logical that his reward is dishonor. What is this if not a test of the strength of that very grassroots memory?

Dmitriev’s “business”, thus, should be considered a continuation of the work of his life in another sense. For thirty years of the search, Dmitriev has already done much more than it seems to be able to make one person. The process over Dmitriev, especially the advance of the disgust of the charges against him - is the transition of his life to a new quality. The screaming injustice of accusations is important precisely by this quality, because a deeply sleeping one can only be wake up with a scream. It very accurately reflects what continues to happen with the memory of millions of victims of Soviet terror. And maybe, to all those who understand this, it is time to finally apply the very skill to be a people - instead of remaining subject to any manipulation of the population.

The wave raised already by this process is worthy of special attention in this sense. The public campaign in support of Dmitriev quickly turned from the usual calls to an obscure addressee to free the innocent and restore the legality in a series of very personal reasoning about the importance of his activity, about memory, repentance, and condemning state terror.

And it’s scary to watch how this chain works. Someone is embarrassed by the criminal article, someone-the politicization of the noise rising around the noise, someone, as usual, says that there is no smoke without fire. But five dozen videouters , the stories of those who have visited Dmitriev’s open places, do their job. The point seems to be even more important than an attempt to make the initiators of this process change into thought. Very different people - and among those who supported Dmitriev there are “faithful liberals”, and historians, and well -known actors, and Orthodox priests that are not prone to pathetics - find different words to describe the importance of work started by Dmitriev. These words fall on very different ground, and the number of those who know about this story and asking themselves the questions related to it slowly but correctly expands. And this invisible process can be compared with an invisible but inevitable process of awareness of historical truth. After all, understanding of such things does not happen overnight, does not collapse as an external effect, but always turns out to be the result of internal evolution, comes to each special way, knows how to wait and wait.

Strictly speaking, the problem of Russia is the lack of awareness of what happened to it in the 20th century at the very basic level with which Dmitriev tries to work. Planted from above, whether it is love for a strong hand or democracy, does not take root well and quickly disappears. And only personally experienced, well-thought-out and suffered can truly form a position. This takes time, but also has incommensurably great value.

When we, before delving into the forest, crossed the 8th gateway of the White Mokorkanal, one of the caretakers of the gateway cheerfully asked what we forgot there-it was very bad with mushrooms this year. Hearing about the burial of the victims of the Gulag, he became serious, but did not answer. When we walked back a few hours, this man approached us to say that, the 9th gateway, according to his information, also found bones ...