Russia is finally trying to deal with its dark Stalinist history

Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

• Russian society is starting to come to terms with the darkest years of Stalinism that gripped the country and its people in the 1930s.
• Though authorities in some cases have cooperated with grassroots efforts to recover the remains of executed family members and help them to rebuild the memories of their ancestors, the Russian government still is unwilling to provide full transparency.
• The way the history of the period is taught in Russia is still very nationalistic and does not present a full picture of Joseph Stalin’s crimes. 
• Under President Vladimir Putin, Russian people are holding more positive opinions of Stalin than they had before.

VORONEZH, RUSSIA — Just about every former Soviet city has a place outside town, usually a forest or piece of scrubland, where Joseph Stalin’s secret police brought thousands of executed “enemies of the people” and dumped them into mass graves, especially during the nightmare years of the Great Terror of 1936-38. 

Here in Voronezh, a central Russian city of about 1 million people, that place is known as Dubovka. It’s a forlorn stretch of sparse oak forest that even today can be reached only by a long hike along unmarked paths. For decades the subject of rumors and frightened whispers, Dubovka was recently designated an official “memorial zone.” Mostly youthful volunteers have been excavating the pits each summer, removing and reburying the remains of at least 10,000 local victims that are thought to have been interred here. 

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