A group formed of scientific researchers, university teachers, students and priests of the “Meeting of God” Church of the State University of Moldova on July 19 – August 2 had been on a memorial expedition entitled “Following the footsteps of Moldovan/Romanian martyrs in the Solovetsky Archipelagos”. The documentary materials and video images collected on the spot will be used to make a documentary and for historical writings.
The expedition was planned by the Social History Institute “Pro Memoria” in concert with the Faculty of History and Philosophy and the Faculty of Journalism and Communication Sciences of the State University and with the Association of Historians of Moldova. The documentation activities were carried out in the Solovetsky Archipelagos and on the territory of the Autonomous Republic of Karelia of the Russian Federation.
In a news conference at IPN, historian Anatol Petrencu said that at the Memorial Cemetery in Sandarmoh, located about 15 km from Medvejegorsk town of Karelia, the expedition raised a cross in memory of the victims of the political repression in the Soviet Russia. According to preliminary data, over 30 Moldovans were executed there. About 10,000 people of approximately 60 nationalities were shot dead in the forest located on the outskirts of the town, at the place of a quarry, by the decision of the Bolshevik troika.
Professor Andrei Dumbraveanu related that in the morning when the cross was raised, there was held a service in Romanian. Locals told the historians that they hear cries of those who were killed at the places where there were cemeteries earlier. “During two weeks, we had been at that place, where you can step on bones if you dig a little,” he stated.
Historian Ion Negrei said the documentation activities and commemoration events involved local scientists, museographers and people of culture as well as descendants of the victims of the gulag, who were mainly elderly people who provided additional information about the fate of the Bessarabians and Transnistrians deported to those places. The Solovetsky Monastery and the network of hermitages in the Solovetsky Archipelagos in the 1920-1930 served as places for deporting ‘contra-revolutionary and anti-Soviet elements’ from the Bolshevik Russia to them. Persons hostile to the Soviet power were exterminated morally and physically there.
The expedition forms part of the state program “Recovery and promotion of the memory of the victims of the totalitarian Communist regime”.
