As cold cases go, Denis Karagodin’s mission was as bleak as the winter in his native Siberia. For nine years, he has been digging into Russian and Soviet archives to find out who killed his great-grandfather Stepan Karagodin in 1938 during the purges and iron-fist rule of Joseph Stalin.

The Karagodin family had long believed that Stepan, a peasant farmer, died of tuberculosis in a Soviet prison camp in 1943, serving time for anti-Soviet activities. Karagodin uncovered the real story bit by bit:

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