STALIN'S AMERICAN VICTIMS

...But the main point—not at all well known—is this: The plans for the canal called for it to be made almost entirely of wood...

...If CNN's prestigious panel of historical researchers had pursued these questions, they would have found much that was unusually illuminating about the nature of the Soviet system of the 1930s—and illuminating in a way that would have been especially interesting for the network's American audiences...

...The canal was—and is—lined with huge trees, which could only have been logged from the Karelian forests with the aid of skilled lumberjacks...

...This is not to say that all of the Americans worked on the canal...

...But Sander-makh now confirms that many skilled American workers in the Soviet Union at that time, unmentioned by CNN, were not "free to go when the job was over...

...The lists give each person's year and place of birth, country of departure before arriving in the Soviet Union, year of arrival, and occupation...

...But for many Americans, questions will remain...

...A little way back from the canal were the bodies of thousands, "not even in regular graves, just buried like animals...

...In Tuominen's neglected memoirs, The Bells of the Kremlin, he describes how many of the American loggers were put to work as slave laborers constructing the Stalin Canal in Karelia during the 1930s...

...Tuominen describes a tour of the canal he made in the summer of 1933—just a few days after its opening by Stalin: "Cement had hardly been used at all," he wrote with amazement...

...But historians in the U.S...

...They targeted Finnish-Americans, in particular, Finnish-American forestry workers...

...defense intelligence archives, has the general veracity of her memoirs been confirmed...

...As it happens, she worked in New York during the early 1930s as an illegal emissary of the Communist International and thus had an inside view on the entire organization of the recruitment of Finnish-American workers for Karelia...

...Only recently, thanks to U.S...

...The memoirs provided an authoritative account of the "monstrous swindle," as she called the Karelian immigration episode...

...Nearly all arrived in the Soviet Union between 1931 and 1933, the period of most intense Soviet recruitment among the North American Finnish ethnic communities...

...What spelled the end for most of these North Americans was the Terror of 1937-38, which led directly to the pits of Sandermakh and elsewhere—places where, as British author Robert Service described them in A History of Twentieth-Century Russia, "vans and lorries marked 'Meat' or 'Vegetables' would carry the victims out to a quiet wood . . . where shooting grounds and long, deep pits had been secretly prepared...

...Finnish-American forestry workers were ideal because Karelia was largely Finnish-speaking and possessed an under-developed forestry industry...

...of those born in North America, some were still teenagers when they traveled to Karelia with their families...

...But luckily, the scholarly evidence for it has been well summarized in a book published early this year— before the authors became aware of the Sandermakh find—entitled The Soviet World of American Communism...

...One could not even imagine how many millions of trees had been used to line those long and deep canals with logs...

...But notations in the records show that 115 of the "Finns" came to Karelia from the United States and 106 from Canada...

...Members of the Russian historical society known as Memorial had located the site, some 245 miles north of St...

...But he says that "the opening of mass graves in Karelia has definitively answered those questions—we know what happened and who was responsible...

...One of these wreaths, photographed by Veniamin Ioffe of Memorial's St...

...Perhaps Sandermakh, with its wooden chapel in the Karelian forest, its monuments, and the nearby canal—never useful for anything more serious than tourist boats—may come to fill the void...

...Most had originally migrated to the United States or Canada from Finland...

...And what logs they were, the straightest and thickest Karelian pine, all rounded and tarred...

...The case of former Finnish-Soviet agent Aino Kuusinen is instructive...

...It turns out, however, that the discovery sheds light not only on Russia's past, but on an extraordinary story that for 60 years has been one of the darkest secrets in the history of the American Left...

...Nearly 40 years later, as a Gulag survivor and defector to Western Europe, she arranged for the posthumous publication of her memoirs, The Rings of Destiny (Morrow...

...The network reported that a mass grave of more than 9,000 people had been excavated in a forest glade in Sandermakh, situated "amid the low hills and picturesque streams of Karelia, a republic in northwest Russia...

...While observing that few historians mention the Karelian episode, Harvey Klehr and his co-authors focus on the suppression that occurred within the Finnish-American community...

...The Times observed that although it was "too early to know who the buried were, it is assumed most were intellectuals from Moscow and St...

...The significance of these comments was made manifest a few months later when at the opening of a memorial chapel in the woods, wreaths were laid in the snow at the Sandermakh site...

...But the pervasive sense that was spread among Finnish-Americans, that the fate of those who disappeared in Karelia was simply not discussed in polite society, also worked its way into general academic circles in the United States...

...How is it that American historians of the period do not even acknowledge in their books that thousands of American workers were in the Soviet Union during the 1930s—let alone that many of them were executed...

...The locks were also wooden...

...This defense is no longer possible...

...The first episode of this series actually discusses the issue of Americans in Russia in the early 1930s—but without once mentioning the thousands of Finnish-Americans who were lured there at that time...

...The canal was built by a massive slave labor force working at breakneck speed with hand-held implements...

...Memorial spokesmen also mentioned that among the victims were members of "ethnic minorities" and— most significantly—people who "had come to Karelia to build socialism...

...Now a peaceful site of once terrible evil, Sandermakh would be an appropriate place in Russia for visitors—official and otherwise—to commemorate the victims of the waning twentieth century's cruelest delusion...

...As late as 1936, Tuominen spoke with Americans who had worked elsewhere in Russia and later found their way to Moscow...

...Tuominen described Stalinist "natural selection" in action on the canal...

...They spoke straight from the shoulder to the GPU men (the secret police) as well, with the result that, after a while, they lost even that freedom that had been theirs...

...Commentators such as Anne Applebaum have made the point that despite the collapse of communism in Russia, there still is little physical evidence of the unimaginable killings that took place under Stalin...

...The authors of this volume, historians Harvey Klehr and John Haynes and Russian archivist Kyrill Anderson, not only document the basic facts of the matter, they also charge that North American Communist leaders of the time, after encouraging FinnishAmericans to travel to Finnish-speaking Soviet Karelia, did nothing to help them when they were later arrested...

...Those who were ultimately executed at Sander-makh were not the only ones to vanish: Finnish scholars estimate that of about 5,000 North Americans who traveled to Karelia in the early 1930s—including whole families—roughly 1,000 subsequently disappeared without a trace...

...ignored her account as the product of "a weird imagination...

...Like everyone else, the media learn most of what they know of the past from historians, and it is the almost total neglect by historians of the thousands of people who migrated from North America to the Soviet Union during the 1930s that raises the most disturbing questions...

...The answers do not lie in the published archives, but they are evident in the superb memoirs of a one-time Finnish-Communist leader, Arvo Tuominen, who saw what took place at the Karelian end of the deal while traveling in the region as a Soviet guest...

...CNN commented: "Memorial believes that the Karelian discovery sheds new light on Stalin's purges when an estimated 14 million Soviets died...

...When almost impossible work norms were not met, the meager food allowances were reduced further, which in turn increased susceptibility to infectious diseases...

...Each of the North Americans whose remains lie at Sandermakh disappeared in Soviet Karelia during the 1930s, after being lured there in a Depression-era immigration scam that was run by Moscow through the U.S...

...The lists show that people executed and buried at Sandermakh were categorized by the secret police as either Russians, Finns, or Karelians...

...Author Carl Ross, who will be including the victims' names in his forthcoming The Finn Factor in American Labor, Culture and Society, told me that he has long been "disturbed over the plight of the numerous people in the United States who knew nothing more than that members of their families, or acquaintances, 'disappeared' and were never heard of again...

...Who were the victims of Sandermakh...

...In recent months, lists of names of Sandermakh victims, from secret police records, have been published in a respected monthly cultural journal called Karelia, put out in the Russian city of Petrozavodsk...

...At Sandermakh, Memorial's excavation teams found scores of trenches filled with jumbled skeletal remains and thousands of bullet casings...

...Ross cautions against publishing names at this stage since spelling errors may have occurred in transcription...

...And why were these workers no longer needed after the mid-1930s...

...There is a remaining historical puzzle in all this...

...The London Times also reported the find, describing it as "one of the most grisly discoveries of post-Communist Russia...

...These "were among 'the Last of the Mohicans,' " he wrote, "who dared express their thoughts and not only to me...

...But the list also includes housewives, musicians, teachers, publishers, actors, carpenters, blacksmiths, mechanics, plumbers, painters, and a journalist...

...Petersburg...

...Americans and others in the logging crews who felled and stripped the trees were given just enough food to stay alive...

...CNN described them simply as "political prisoners...

...After her name—as with every other name on the list—are the single word "shot" and the date of execution...

...It is clear enough that Communist party suppression of the subject among ordinary Finnish-Americans was made easier by the manipulation of Finnish cultural traits: Finns are "silent in two languages," Bertolt Brecht once said...

...Petersburg near the town of Medvezhye-gorsk, after finding secret police archives of written execution orders for victims who were shot there during the height of the Terror of 1937-38...

...She offered a vivid description of how the American migration hysteria known as "Karelia fever" was whipped up, describing how thousands of emigrants were enrolled at revivalist-style mass meetings, while Soviet steamers sailed from New York to Leningrad...

...Among the dead listed by Karelia are names well known to Finnish-American scholars like Ross...

...Further, they produce documents showing that the North American Communist leaders, acting under instructions from Moscow, took "active measures" to suppress reports of the victims' fate...

...But what was the urgency behind the recruitment program...

...And still are—as may be seen in current tourist brochures of the area, now open to outsiders since the lall of the Soviet Union...

...Unlike the Russians, they were free to go when the job was over...

...Many of the Finnish-Americans arrived from remote States like Oregon and California," she wrote, "in cars bought with the proceeds from the sale of their houses...

...The death toll from the canal given by today's Russian authorities is approximately 250,000...

...Communist ideology didn't worry them...

...They include Matti Tenhunen and Oscar Corgan, prominent Finnish-American Communists who, after migrating to Karelia, were publicly denounced as "spies" by the Soviet authorities...

...Despite the large numbers of Americans and Canadians known to have been among these, to the best of my knowledge, no U.S...

...Most historians have neglected the episode...

...They quote very effectively from the belated testimonies of survivors on how they were kept silent for decades...

...Another photograph by Memorial's Veniamin Ioffe is of a general monument at Sandermakh, opened by the Karelian government in late August 1998...

...According to archival documents cited in The Soviet World of American Communism, Moscow wanted skilled workers in the early 1930s to help with "modernization" in Karelia...

...Two months ago, a prominent Brown University historian, James Patterson, argued that the ultimate fate of the North Americans in Karelia was a matter of doubt...

...The narrator recounts how, in the early 1930s, "American experts" and their families traveled to Russia to help with industrialization, commenting: "While Soviet muscles strained to raise dams and blast furnaces, American corporations supplied skilled engineers on contract...

...Consider the CNN Cold War series, advised by an impressive panel of historical consultants...

...Ross said his family often enjoyed Tenhunen's hospitality and that he also knew Corgan, "manager of the Tyomies," a Finnish-language paper for which Ross's father worked...

...But the Peter Day, former American correspondent for the Australian, is a publisher in Sydney...

...Such killing fields are of course hidden all over the old Soviet Union...

...Each of the dead had been shot in the back of the head while kneeling at the edge of one of the trenches...

...Why has it taken so long for the discovery of the remains at Sandermakh to be reported...

...Petersburg office, bore a tiny American flag...

...Reviewing The Soviet World of American Communism in the Atlantic Monthly, Patterson conceded that "many of these people were apparently executed," but noted that the "evidence for the killings . . . comes from accusations in subsequently written memoirs from family members and from survivors—not from the archives...

...Stalin's American Victims The Sad Saga of Finnish-American Communists in 1930s Russia By Peter Day In July 1997, CNN posted a poignant "photographic essay" on its Internet news site about the discovery in Russia of what it called a "horrific reminder of the nation's past...

...Thus a memoir written by one American couple, Lawrence and Sylvia Hokkanen (titled Karelia: A Finnish-American Couple in Stalin's Russia), appeared only in 1991—a full half century after the experiences it describes...

...The youngest, born in Minnesota, was 14 or 15 when she traveled to Karelia in 1932, and 20 or 21 when she was executed at San-dermakh...

...and Canadian officials were present at its opening...

...and Canadian Communist parties...

...Some American academics are unconvinced...

...Forestry workers from ages 20 through 40 dominate the execution list...

...But most of the North American victims were "ordinary people...

...This monument is in memory not only of those who died at Sandermakh, but of all the victims of Stalinism in Karelia...

...Inquiries recently undertaken in Russia have now shown that among the Sandermakh victims were more than 200 North Americans...