WORLD WAR II, THE RESEARCH OF THE REMAINS OF SOVIET SOLDIERS WHO DIED DEFENDING.

 WORLD WAR II, THE RESEARCH OF THE REMAINS OF SOVIET SOLDIERS WHO DIED DEFENDING.

The skeletons are never far away from Konstantin A. Dobrovolsky, as World War II is known in Russia, and the current war, it is a comparison that

The skeletons are never far away from Konstantin A. Dobrovolsky. Sometimes he sleeps above them in a tiny olive-green trailer in the woods. 

The people they might once have been appear in his dreams.

For 44 summers, he has traversed the hilly scrabble northwest of Murmansk, the most populous city above the Arctic Circle and the northernmost frontier in World War II, in search of the remains of Soviet soldiers who died defending it.

He has continued unearthing those bones even as descendants of the soldiers — of Russian, Ukrainian and other ethnic origins — are dying on a new front line, in Ukraine. 

While the Kremlin has sought to draw parallels between the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known in Russia, and the current war, it is a comparison that Mr. Dobrovolsky, who is categorically opposed to the invasion of Ukraine, wholeheartedly rejects.

He tries to identify the remains whenever possible and track down any living relatives, which as time has passed is an increasingly rare occurrence. 

On a recent weekend, his assistant, Aleksei S. Smolev, pulled out a barley malt sack from the trailer that serves as Mr. Dobrovolsky’s digging base and delicately laid out its contents: a heap of bones blackened by almost eight decades underground.

“One leg is broken,” said Mr. Dobrovolsky, 67, whose forensics training is self-taught. “The skull is missing, but we can see from the jawbone that he was very young, teenage or early 20s, because his teeth have not been ground down.”

The bones were from one of the more than 20,000 soldiers that Mr. Dobrovolsky and the group of searchers he oversees have found in the rocky tundra that was the front line from 1941 to 1944. 

Nazi soldiers sought to take Murmansk, home to Russia’s only port with unrestricted access, via the Barents Sea, to the Atlantic Ocean, because it played a crucial role enabling the United States and Britain to supply the Soviet Union with weapons, food and fuel.

In 1979, when Mr. Dobrovolsky began searching for fallen soldiers, he said their corpses “seemed more plentiful in the forest than mushrooms.” 

He and fellow veterans who joined his quest — part of a decentralized national movement that would come to be called the Searchers — were deeply upset that the state had not cared more for the fighters its leaders hail as heroes.

Black-and-white photographs from Mr. Dobrovolsky’s initial efforts in the 1980s show heaps of bones in the former trenches, lying right on the surface, where they had been abandoned.

These days, finding the fallen has become more difficult, requiring the team to use metal detectors to uncover munitions or personal effects. 

The earth is still riddled with shrapnel, nails, bullet casings and other reminders of the war.

Mr. Dobrovolsky and his team have spent years reconstructing the German and Russian positions, which included wooden dugouts and homes that the Nazis built for themselves in the hills (the Soviet soldiers had only tents, he said), as well as monuments to the fallen (when they can be identified); all this, largely without government funding.

The Soviet Union lost 27 million lives during the war, touching almost every family. As time has passed, a culture of commemoration has become embedded into many facets of public life.

 It has taken on even greater importance recently as part of President Vladimir V. Putin’s efforts to militarize society, and it has been invoked to falsely justify the full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a similar war against Nazism.

“Today, as part of a special military operation” — as the Kremlin refers to the war in Ukraine — “the guys are again defending our country, and our people while fighting Nazism,” Murmansk’s regional governor, Andrey V. Chibis, said last month at a ritual burial of the remains of World War II soldiers, which is done yearly in former frontline regions.

Mr. Dobrovolsky, in addition to his antiwar stance, has made no secret of his displeasure with the official rhetoric glorifying the World War II sacrifice while doing little to care for the dead, and he says he fears a repeat of that with the conflict in Ukraine. For the first time in 40 years, he was forbidden from speaking at the Murmansk ceremony.

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