Norwegian diplomats again skip ceremony honouring victims of Stalin’s terror
By Thomas Nilsen, Georgii Chentemirov
For the second consecutive year, Norway’s diplomatic missions in Russia have stayed away from the country’s most prominent memorial ceremony for the victims of Stalinist terror at the Sandarmokh mass graves in the Republic of Karelia.
Norway is now the only Nordic country to maintain a Consulate General in St Petersburg after Russia ordered the Swedish and Finnish consulates to close as retaliatory diplomatic measures in the autumn of 2023.
For many years, diplomats from the Nordic countries gathered at Sandarmokh on 5 August to honour the victims of Stalin’s Great Terror. The annual Day of Remembrance commemorates the thousands of people executed by the Soviet regime.
The NKVD executed more than 6,000 people of 58 different nationalities at the site in 1937 and 1938. A large proportion of the victims were Ukrainians.
“Due to resource constraints, the Consulate General was unable to travel to Sandarmokh this year,” Ane Haavardsdatter Lunde, spokesperson for Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told the Barents Observer.
Lunde added that the Consulate General lays flowers at several other memorials in and around St Petersburg, including sites commemorating “the victims of Stalin’s Great Terror against his own population”.
Norway also stayed away from the ceremony last year. In contrast, diplomats from Poland and Finland, including Finland’s ambassador, travelled from their embassies in Moscow to lay wreaths and pay tribute to the victims.
This year, Germany’s Consul General, Milan Simandl, attended the ceremony and laid flowers.
Until the mid-2010s, the annual commemorations at Sandarmokh were officially organised and attended by regional authorities, ministers and governors.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, however, the memorial events have repeatedly been disrupted by far-right and pro-Kremlin groups. Members of Russkaya Obshchina (“Russian Community”) and Cossack organisations staged another provocation this week. Dressed in black uniforms with their faces covered, they walked through the memorial cemetery carrying Russian flags and approached participants who were reading aloud the names of those executed during the Great Terror.
According to the Telegram channel Bumaga, participants in the memorial ceremony did not respond to the provocations.
The coordinator of Russkaya Obshchina, who administers the group’s VKontakte page, refused to answer questions from the Barents Observer and blocked our journalist after being asked why members of the organisation cover their faces at public events.
The nationalist group had also parked a car near the memorial, blasting the song Victory Day at high volume. The song has become one of the most recognisable patriotic symbols associated with the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War.
At the same time, today’s Russia criminalises public statements that contradict the state’s official narrative of the war. This includes describing the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as a joint agreement to divide Eastern Europe, or stating that the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on 17 September 1939, less than three weeks after Nazi Germany attacked Poland from the west.
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