October 4, 2002	Friday	Rajab 26, 1423

RZHEVSKY ARTILLERY RANGE (Russia): The artillery range had been a source of rich pickings for children like David Pelganen, hunting for mushrooms and berries.

And then he came across a pit full of bodies.

“I told my father, and then one of the guards from the range phoned town,” said Pelganen, now 77.

“After that we were told we had seen nothing and we were to forget about it, so we didn’t go there again,” added Pelganen who was 11 or 12 years old at the time.

It is only now that Russia’s Memorial human rights group has begun removing skulls and body parts from the common grave outside St Petersburg of victims of Stalin’s Terror, described to them by Pelganen.

Memorial, which works to expose the excesses of the Stalin era, says it gets no help from the government to excavate the site — a fact that reflects the ambivalence of Russia’s present-day rulers to the unpalatable truths of the communist past.

“It (the government) is not doing what it should be doing. We have had to do everything ourselves,” said Irina Flige, St Petersburg director of Memorial.

Russia has never held a public trial to identify and convict those responsible for the deaths of millions who perished in the purges of the Soviet dictator.

Former prisoners of the Gulag have been found living alongside former secret police executioners, both rubbing shoulders in bank queues to draw on their state pensions.

Though only 16 skulls have been recovered so far from the site in a forested corner of the Rzhevsky artillery range, Memorial says the remains of many thousands could lie there.

The organization believes they were shot arbitrarily by Stalin’s secret police during the Great Terror of the 1930s when whole families were spirited away as “enemies of the people”.

The government attitude in part reflects people’s uncertainty in agreeing on the final place for Stalin, who died in 1953, in the country’s history books.

True, he was the architect of the Terror, Russians concede. But he was also the man who led the Soviet Union to ultimate victory over Germany in World War Two and restored order after revolutionary chaos.

Even Pelganen, with childhood memories of jumbled bodies in a sandy pit, has a bust of Stalin on a cupboard in his home.

“It’s true that at his command, we suffered a lot. But at least we had discipline and order and we could walk the streets at night, not like now,” he said, alluding to the high crime level in post-Soviet Russia.

BONES LOCATED: Mikhail Pushnitsky, a Memorial volunteer who has been helping disinter some of the skeletons for study, lost relatives in the Terror. He said he was striving to uncover the past to help Russians confront and understand it.

“It’s awful when people have been shot like dogs, with this whole great city nearby and no one remembers,” he said.

In the search volunteers dig into sunken patches of ground and prod the earth with a metal spike.

“When your spike hits a bone it makes a slightly different noise,” said Pushnitsky, demonstrating by jabbing the sand repeatedly until he hit a fragment.

Crouched in the bottom of a waist-deep pit, he swept away the last of the dirt covering one skeleton, revealing a sudden double line of sturdy white teeth, bright against the sandy soil and the dark brown of the skull.

Reaching round beneath the skull, he added: “He’ll have a bullet hole about here.”

Nearly every one of the skulls unearthed has a neat 0.45 calibre bullet hole in the nape of the neck — a sure indication for Memorial that these were victims of the Terror.

They believe the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, used its trademark single shot to kill thousands on this site with their service-issue weapons.—Reuters