A replica concentration camp for schoolchildren has been built in Karelia (northern Russia), with the first kids due to be taken there for a ‘patriotic weekend’ in December. The initiative is funded by a presidential grant and coincides with officially sponsored efforts to rewrite history by claiming that ‘thousands’ of the nine thousand victims of the Soviet Terror buried in mass graves at Sandarmokh were Soviet soldiers killed in the War. This is by no means the only ‘historical readjustment’ currently underway in Russia but is especially sinister as one historian has already died in prison, and another, Yury Dmitriev, is facing up to 20 years’ imprisonment on evidently absurd charges.
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Halya Coynash: Model concentration camp deployed in Russia
Russian historian Yury Dmitriyev (C), who heads rights group Memorial's branch in Karelia, arrives for the verdict in his child pornography trial at a court in the city of Petrozavodsk in northwestern Russia on April 5, 2018.
