In the spring of 2020, while you, the reader, were gathering dust in your apartment under the grip of quasi-quarantine, Northern Metaphysics visited the Karelian forest clearing with the strangely jaunty name of Sandarmokh, located some ten kilometers from the nearest habitation. Pines. Wind whispering through those pines. Lingering April snow. Air of astonishing clarity. And more than six thousand victims of the Great Terror, buried right here in two hundred and thirty-six execution pits.
Today it is a memorial cemetery: a recently built chapel with a Book of Remembrance, where the names of all those executed are inscribed; symbolic grave markers; plaques and photographs nailed to trees, scattered across several hectares of forest.
That is today. Back then, in the 1930s, the condemned — many of them prisoners of SLON ((Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp (Solovetsky Lager Osobogo Naznacheniya), one of the earliest concentration camps in the USSR)— were brought here in small groups of five or six. They were forced to dig their own grave and to undress, after which they lay down in the pit to receive a bullet to the back of the head from their own state. The next groups arrived to a ready-made grave: they were laid on top of the dead bodies, and this was repeated until the pit was filled. Then a new one was dug.
Revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, Whites and Reds, workers and intellectuals, men and women, believers and atheists, Russians, Karelians, Germans, Finns, Tatars, representatives of dozens of other nationalities. Death leveled them all here.
If chronomirages exist, Sandarmokh is surely one of the places where they might occur. What could one have heard here then? Screams, sobbing, moans, gunshots, pleas for mercy, shouted commands, barking dogs?
We heard nothing. Only the wind moving through the pines.
Perhaps we arrived at the wrong time. Perhaps another time.
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