The Red Soul lays bare the Russian psyche of today and shows a world full of contradictions. In a country where hardly any family escaped the hunger, fear and violence resulting from Stalin's reign of terror, no one has ever been convicted for the crimes committed under his regime. Even now, more than 50 years after Stalin's death, Russians remain deeply divided over how to deal with the memories of this painful past.

The Red Soul

Through a thick layer of snow in the forests of Russia, historian Yuri Dmitriev searches for unmarked and lost graves. His singular efforts have uncovered mass burial sites of those who were killed under Stalin’s “Great Terror” of 1937. With no help from official channels, he traces the dead and rescues their memory from the eternal doom of oblivion. Dmitriev’s riveting story is a tale of one man’s fight against the erasure of history by the state