Russia’s Investigative Committee has transferred the remains of 32 Soviet prison inmates to the Novosibirsk branch of the human rights group Memorial.
The bones were discovered in May 2013, during construction at a site that was an NKVD prison from 1929 to 1951. In that time, hundreds of thousands of inmates passed through the prison, and tens of thousands—executed in the prison yard—never left.
Alexander Rudnitsky, Memorial’s regional branch coordinator, told the news agency Taiga.info that the bones will be sent for tests to determine exactly when the executions took place, though he’s confident it was at some point in the 1930s. The victims’ ages range, he says, from elderly people to one 15-year-old child.
“We’re absolutely going to bury the remains, and we’d like to create a memorial. If it’s not possible to determine the identity of the deceased or find any living relatives, there are still relatives of other inmates killed at this prison in Novosibirsk. I think they would take part in the burial,” Rudnitsky said.
In March 2015, local officials in Perm forced into dissolution an NGO that had independently maintained Russia’s only Stalinist Gulag museum operated out of a still-standing prison complex.
On March 4, members of Memorial reported that the local government in Perm will transform the museum to showcase the technical means used to keep prisoners detained, focusing more on the guards than the inmates, with little or no mention of Stalin and Soviet political repression.