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September 21, 2002
TOKSOVO, Russia -- Working to uncover the secrets of the collapsed Soviet Union, diggers say they have found 20 sets of bones in what they believe is a vast burial ground for thousands of victims of dictator Josef Stalin's firing squads.
So far, the volunteers from the human rights group Memorial have sent nine sets of remains to a forensic laboratory for tests of identifying features including age, sex, cause and time of death.
Russian officials have said they believe millions of people died from executions and brutal imprisonment under Stalin's rule. His security forces ruthlessly arrested people suspected of political disloyalty, espionage, failure to work hard enough in factories or on farms, or of not fighting hard enough against German invaders. Stalin died in 1953.
Memorial will stop digging and declare the site a monument to the victims if the Federal Security Service, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, confirms the area is part of the suspected Stalin-era mass grave, Memorial activist Irina Flige said.
The work is grim in the forest outside Toksovo, about 20 miles northwest of St. Petersburg. With the sound of artillery shells exploding on a nearby army testing range, volunteer diggers stand waist-deep in pits, groping for bones with gloved hands.
Volunteers searched for five years before finding the grave, which they estimate could contain about 30,000 bodies in an area of about 500 acres. They have been digging here since August.
The only other known mass grave in the St. Petersburg area is believed to contain the remains of up to 8,500 people, according to drivers who brought the victims to be execution place in 1937-38, at the height of the terror.
The drivers were questioned by the KGB in 1965, during a time when Soviet authorities gingerly began to admit the massive scope of Stalin's crimes.
Russian officials have said they believe millions of people died in the communist purges before Stalin's death. Yet there was no trace of tens of thousands of other victims who were rounded up in and around Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was known in Soviet times.
Both the KGB and the Federal Security Service kept silent about where victims were buried, so in the mid 1990s Memorial began appealing for information.
Memorial has come across other, indirect evidence that indicates the approximately 30,000 missing victims were buried at the range. It includes official documents and aerial photos showing tire tracks in part of the now-overgrown Rzhevsk range.
Anyone buried there could not have been killed by the Nazis because German forces did not reach this area in World War II, Memorial said.