The OGPU investigation of the Pokrovsky brothers in summer 1932 helps us put faces to four names. Ivan was executed in Moscow, one death in the maelstrom unleashed by the forced industrialisation of the USSR and the dekulakisation of the countryside. Alexander was shot four years later at Sandarmokh, a victim of the Great Terror. … Continue reading Remembrance (4), “No smoke without fire?”
Month: May 2021
Remembrance (3): Four brothers
Alexander Pokrovsky and his three brothers were born in a village in what today is Russia's Oryol Region. By the early 1930s, they had moved to Moscow. Ivan (1904-1933), Simeon (b. 1911), and Sergei (b. 1915) There in summer 1932 the OGPU (predecessor of the NKVD) arrested them and by October that year all four … Continue reading Remembrance (3): Four brothers
Remembrance (2): Shot at Sandarmokh
Alexander Pokrovsky, 1912-1937 "Remembrance (1)" recalled the efforts of volunteers like Yury DMITRIEV over the past quarter century, thanks to which the names and reputations of some three million victims of the Soviet regime have been restored. It would be natural to proceed from the discovery of the killing field at Sandarmokh in 1997 to … Continue reading Remembrance (2): Shot at Sandarmokh
Remembrance (1): Lists and Names
Faced by the grim and relentless persecution of Yury DMITRIEV over the last four years, it’s easy to lose sight of the achievements of the past quarter century, those countless acts of remembrance across Russia and former Soviet states that make any simple return to the past unthinkable. Yury Dmitriev resumes work, 2018 During the … Continue reading Remembrance (1): Lists and Names
The Dmitriev Affair 