What Happened Here?

An intensive campaign of political repression and persecution on a massive scale was orchestrated in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin beginning in 1937. This period, known as the Great Terror, was marked by omnipresent police surveillance, the mass executions of “saboteurs,” and imprisonment of people of all walks of life, who swelled the population of labor camps. At the height of the Great Terror, many citizens turned against each other, identifying ’suspicious’ people to the authorities and effectively sending them to their deaths. Many of these people later become victims themselves. During this time over 5,000 citizens from the Tver region were arrested, imprisoned, and shot in the cellar of the NKVD regional headquarters in Tver City. Their bodies were then taken by truck for secret burial in mass graves in the Mednoe forest.

In 1939, following the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the eastern part of Poland was annexed by the USSR. As a result of this annexation, more than 20,000 Polish officers were taken to other parts of the Soviet Union. Over 6,000 of them were interned at the Ostashkov camp in the Tver region. In the spring of 1940 these Ostashkov camp Polish officers – policemen, border-guards and correctional officers – were all executed on orders from Stalin. Bodies of these officers were then brought to the Mednoe forest for burial in mass graves. Today, the remains of approximately 6,300 Polish officers have been identified at the site. Prior to 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev opened the NKVD archives to the public, the Soviet government had blamed Nazi Germany for the executions.

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What Happened Here?