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 … Continue reading On another front (2023)
dekulakisation*
WHY DMITRIEV? (1)
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 … Continue reading WHY DMITRIEV? (1)
Deported, Rearrested, Imprisoned, Shot
The information gathered in the 1990s in Russia’s Books of Remembrance about “victims of political repression” mainly derives from the records of the Soviet police and security services. Even that thin evidence provides glimpses of human suffering that are shocking both in scale and persistence. These examples from the 1930s begin with the forced collectivization … Continue reading Deported, Rearrested, Imprisoned, Shot
Those who did not return
“I would like to recall them all by name, but they’ve taken the list, there’s no way to find out” Anna Akhmatova wrote Requiem, from which this famous couplet is taken, over almost thirty years (1935-1961). In Russia the poem could not be published in full until 1987. Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova and their son Lev (1915) … Continue reading Those who did not return
Remembrance (4), “No smoke without fire?”
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?”
The Dmitriev Affair 