I dig up skeletons of Stalin’s victims to give Georgian families closure | Close Up
“They were thrown in like animals,” says Meri Gonashvili, a Georgian forensic anthropologist at Tbilisi State Medical University, as she describes the scene inside six mass graves discovered at a military base in Batumi, western Georgia. “For this regime, human life didn’t have any value,” she adds.
Gonashvili is referring to the skeletons that belonged to victims of Stalin’s great Reign of Terror, a political campaign in the 1930s aimed at eliminating party officials, army officers, wealthy peasants and anyone deemed “an enemy of the state”. Over 700,000 people were executed across the Soviet Union by the secret police, the NKDV. Almost a century later, mass graves are being discovered and bodies exhumed.
In the absence of a national effort to investigate Soviet crimes, historians, families of those who disappeared and forensic experts like Gonashvili are taking it upon themselves to heal a national trauma by campaigning to find and identify the victims. “There are many families who are waiting for their loved ones to be returned. We owe it to the victims to do everything we can to return them,” says Gonashvili.
Watch Georgia’s Missing People by Robin Forestier-Walker
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