Dmitriev recognized New Righteous of the Nations

/ editors (JC)

Yury DMITRIEV, renowned historian of the Soviet Terror, Head of the Karelia branch of Memorial and Russian political prisoner has been named one of the new Righteous to be honoured on the European Day of the Righteous on 6 March 2024.

Yury Dmitriev (b. 1956)
(photo, Anna Artyemeva)

This is the latest of very many international awards or other forms of recognition of the historian whose persecution has been widely condemned as in reprisal for Dmitriev’s tireless work in ensuring that both the victims of Stalin’s Terror and the perpetrators, are known. Dmitriev will be turning 67 in January 2024 in conditions that seriously undermine the health of men half his age, and publicity is vital if there is to be any hope of securing his release.

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On another front, pt 2

/ editors (JC)

To judge by reports on the internet, the Day in Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression was not commemorated at the surviving memorial in Vladimir yesterday. Instead, the governor broadcast a sombre speech to the Vladimir Region; his words were illustrated by a monument in Siberia (Irkutsk).

“Remember us all, O Motherland, innocent victims. Be merciful and bring us back from oblivion” (central monument at Pivovarikha)

A brave individual went to the site of Vladimir’s other recently dismantled memorial and read out the names of Dolgoruky, Shtepitsky, Laidoner and Jankowski as part of the 12-hour online marathon “Restoring the Names” (8.22 minute).

The governor’s counterparts in other regions also dispensed with meetings and voiced appropriate sentiments. The only large gatherings were prompted by the involvement of the Orthodox Church, which since 2021 has held services on 30 October to pray for all repressed Orthodox Christians (less of a protest, more of a prayer?)

The public reading of names was obstructed in Moscow, for the fourth year in a row; similar events were prohibited or cancelled in Tomsk and Novosibirsk, even when presented as a “Prayer of Remembrance”.

Targeting memorials

Over the past year the memorials erected in Russia have been targeted, especially those in memory of Soviet Poles, as part of the ongoing Memory War, a conflict between the narrative developed, by Memorial and others, and that officially favoured and imposed.

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On another front

/ editors (JC)

On 21 October 2023 it was reported that a memorial to “the victims of Soviet repression” had been demolished in Vladimir. Yet it was not the city’s only memorial of the kind.

In 2021, a gathering led by the local Memorial Society and supported by city authorities was held on the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Political Remembrance (30 October) in the Bogoroditse-Rozhdestvenskoe monastery. Some kind of gathering will presumably take place there today.

Last year such meetings were organised across Russia, usually by the local authorities, and were sometimes attended as in Perm by successor organisations to Memorial (banned in early 2022).

A remarkable online resource, “Russia’s Necropolis of Terror and the Gulag” (also known as the Map of Memory) helps to make sense of this shifting official and public response. Today, some 1,800 sites are known across the country where the victims of the Soviet regime lie buried. In 2014, the Joffe Foundation contacted the local authorities for information about the location and use of such burial grounds and selected four hundred of the better documented for its proposed website.

2016

The Map of Memory duly appeared in 2016; an English version was launched on 5 August 2021. The sites it lists are scattered between town and country across the length and breadth of Russia. A few relate to the savagery of the Civil War; most were linked to the mass crimes of the 1930s to 1950s.

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