Moscow has deployed archaeologists at Sandarmokh, the site in Karelia where more than 10,000 of Stalin’s victims were buried, in a transparent effort to rewrite history a la Katyn by suggesting that those buried there were killed by the Finns during the Winter War rather than by the Soviet dictatorship throughout its history.
Sandarmokh attracted attention beginning in the 1990s thanks to the heroic efforts of investigators like Yury Dmitriyev and Sergey Koltyrin to call attention to Stalin’s crimes. The authorities have locked both of them up on faked charges, but that hasn’t been sufficient to obscure what they proved.