Sandarmokh, Karelia
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The tract where the NKVD shot the Solovky transport on 27 October – 4 November 1937 — the Executed Renaissance.
On 27 October – 4 November 1937 in the Sandarmokh tract near Medvezhyegorsk the NKVD shot 1,111 prisoners of the Solovky transport; the executions were carried out personally by state security captain Mikhail Matveyev, killing 180–265 people a day with a shot to the back of the head. Sources count the Ukrainians among the transport's executed differently — 287 according to Suspilne and Radio Liberty, 290 according to Glavcom; among them Les Kurbas, Mykola Kulish, Mykola Zerov, Valerian Pidmohylny, Pavlo Fylypovych, Marko Voronyi, Stepan Rudnytsky. In all, by various estimates, seven to ten thousand executed people of 58–60 nationalities are buried at Sandarmokh. The execution lists were found in 1995 by Veniamin Iofe, and on 1 July 1997 Yuri Dmitriev and researchers of Memorial discovered 236 execution pits in the tract. On 27 October 1997 a Ukrainian delegation raised a wooden cross; on 5 August 2005 the granite Cossack Cross "To the Murdered Sons of Ukraine" was unveiled. russia persecutes the researchers: Dmitriev was sentenced to 15 years, and historian Sergei Koltyrin died in prison in 2020.
The memorial is on the territory of russia, so for citizens of Ukraine a visit is effectively impossible. On 5 August 2025 pro-russian far-right activists disrupted the annual remembrance ceremony there, and the police did not intervene (Kyiv Independent, 07.08.2025). The mass shootings went on from 27 October to 4 November 1937; in Ukraine the victims of political repression are commemorated every year on the third Sunday of May (Ukrainski Novyny, 18.05.2025).