Kovalevsky Forest is a forest near St Petersburg, Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

, where thousands of Soviet

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 citizens were massacred and buried in the first half of the twentieth century as part of the Red Terror

Red Terror

The Red Terror in Soviet Russia was the campaign of mass arrests and executions conducted by the Bolshevik government. In Soviet historiography, the Red Terror is described as having been officially announced on September 2, 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov and ended about October 1918...

. The site was rediscovered by the human rights charity Memorial

Memorial (society)

Memorial is an international historical and civil rights society that operates in a number of post-Soviet states. It focuses on recording and publicising the Soviet Union's totalitarian past, but also monitors human rights in post-Soviet states....

. In all, around 4,500 people are thought to be buried there. Memorial are currently trying to raise funds to build a museum to commemorate those who died there.

Location

The forest is located within the Rzhevskij Poligon (Ржевский полигон - Rzhev firing range), where up to 30,000 are thought to have been shot during the Red Terror which took place from 1918 into the 1920s. Among those murdered was the poet Nikolay Gumilev. The bodies in Kovalevsky Forest were found by Memorial in 2002.

Museum

Memorial has for many years been trying to build a museum at the site. In 2009 Russian President Dmitry Medvedev

Dmitry Medvedev

Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev is the third President of the Russian Federation.Born to a family of academics, Medvedev graduated from the Law Department of Leningrad State University in 1987. He defended his dissertation in 1990 and worked as a docent at his alma mater, now renamed to Saint...

indicated that he supported the building of a museum to the memory of those killed in Kovalevsky Forest, but as of November 2010, no move has been made by the government or local authorities to provide funds for such a museum.