The Bodies in The Forest

http://harpers.org/archive/2018/02/the-bodies-in-the-forest/
Publisher:  Harper's Magazine
Year Published:  2018
Resource Type:  Article

An excerpt from Gessen's book "Never Remember: Searching for Stalin's Gulags in Putin's Russia", published by Columbia Global Reports. The book examines Stalin's extensive network of labour camps that held and killed millions of prisoners in 1930s to the 1950s.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

They settled on not disturbing the bodies. Still, they had to find all the pits and mark them. there were depressions in the ground as far as they could see. Flige and Iofe went into town and bought wooden fencing planks and red nail polish- the closest thing to a permanent marker they could find. Flige painted numbers on the planks , and the three of them wandered, sticking a plank into the ground where they found a rectangular depression. Whenever they ran out of depressions, thier count would be complete. They stopped 236.