Remembrance

monuments, events, publications

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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KATYN

/ editors (JC)

On his blog about Places of Remembrance in Russia and Ukraine, Airat Bagautdinov recently considered the Memorial Complex at Katyn in Russia’s Smolensk Region.

A place of burial for executed Soviet citizens in the 1920s and 1930s, it became famous as one of three places in the Soviet Union where Polish POWs were buried in May-June 1940 after Stalin ordered their mass execution. (The other two locations were Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine and Mednoe in Russia’s Tver Region: see “Russia’s Necropolis of Terror and the Gulag“.)

Bagautdinov examines the part of the Complex built in 1998-2000 and designed by Russian architect Mikhail Khazanov.

“You pass through a gap in the burial mound. On each side there are plates of corten steel inscribed with the names of the executed. Once forgotten and restored much later, these names seem to be fighting their way through the metal surface.

“The plan of the memorial is very simple. You walk through the forest, between the pine trees. However, your feet do not touch the ground. You move along raised pedestrian pathways 18 inches above the earth. The earth itself is a memorial, Khazanov is telling us. Those who were shot lie beneath every square metre of land and the grass grows from their bodies; therefore you must not set foot on this ground.

“Those who regularly read my blog may remember that this approach was first suggested by Josif Karakis, in his [unaccepted] entry for the Baby Yar monument competition. Khazanov’s work, therefore, is not only a powerful memorial in its own right: it is also a tribute to a Ukrainian master of the genre.”

(Many thanks to Natalya Dyomina who recently posted this wonderful excerpt from Bagautdinov’s blog on the Dmitriev supporters Facebook page, JC.)

WHY DMITRIEV? (1)

/ editors (JC)

In 2002, five years after the tragic death of Ivan Chukhin, Yury DMITRIEV published the Commemorative Lists of Karelia. This Book of Remembrance named 14,308 individuals — most of them shot (11,275); others sent to the Gulag (1,958). The task on which Chukhin and Dmitriev had embarked almost a decade earlier was completed.

Why we should admire Yury Dmitriev

Police investigator and Duma deputy Chukhin also gained access to detailed execution reports in the local FSB archives. These indicated the approximate location of thirteen execution and burial sites scattered across Karelia.

Most were small but two were of particular size and importance. Over 3,000 had been shot, “near Petrozavodsk”, the capital of Karelia. The other site, “near the Medvezhya Gora rail station”, accounted for several thousand more and was located not far from the headquarters of the White Canal camp system (Belbaltlag). Shortly after Chukhin’s death, Dmitriev together with Irina Flige and the late Veniamin Joffe found and identified the killing field near Med Gora, today famous as Sandarmokh. Soon afterwards locals led him to a similar site 20 miles from Petrozavodsk: this became the Krasny Bor memorial complex.

30 October 2021, Krasny Bor

Dmitriev’s achievements could not be gainsaid. Russian and foreign awards followed: in 2005 he was given the new Golden Pen of Russia award; in 2015 he was awarded Poland’s Gold Cross of Merit; and in November 2016, the month before his arrest, he received the Honorary Diploma of Karelia, the highest award in the gift of the head of that Republic.

Why the FSB hates and detests him

Long before 2016 there were signs of official irritation with what Dmitriev did and said.

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