Great Terror*

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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Publicising information from 1938 “would threaten Russia’s security”

/ editors (JC)

As reported before, the Tula Region Court has ruled that it is lawful to restrict access by researchers and the public to the minutes of the Special Troika, the body responsible during the last stages of the Great Terror (1937-1938) for sentencing hundreds to death without investigation or trial.

The text of this ruling, writes Sergei Prudovsky, makes the following assertions:

1. “The date for applying for access has expired …” This statement is incorrect both in terms of the law and the circumstances of the cases;

2. Releasing such information would pose “a threat to the security of the Russian State, to its constitutional system and to the morality, health, rights and legal interests of other persons”;

3. Releasing such information falls under the “ban on spreading information that: [a] could promote war; [b] might incite ethnic, racial or religious hatred and enmity; or [c] is liable to punishment with fines or imprisonment”.

An appeal against this “nonsense” will be submitted before the legally-established deadline by defence attorney Andrei Fedorkov and Memorial lawyer Natalya Sekretaryova.

*

During the Great Terror almost nine thousand people were arrested in the Tula Region: 7,678 were condemned to be shot (2,195) or sent to the Gulag (5,484) on the orders of the regional troika established in October 1937 and the two-man commission or dvoika in Moscow (see the Tula Memorial Society’s website, “The Regional NKVD troika” [R]). Finally, to deal with the backlog of tens of thousands arrested across the USSR, “Special” Troikas were set up in September 1938 in the USSR’s Regions and Republics.

(For a more detailed account of the operation of these three extra-judicial bodies and the charges laid against their victims, see the evidence compiled in Karelia over the past thirty years.)

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“It’s effing unbelievable” (Prudovsky)

/ editors (JC)

The proceedings at today’s hearing of the Supreme Court effectively placed NKVD officers who had engaged in torture during the Great Terror on the same footing as the officers of today’s FSB, entitling them to the same degree of confidentiality regarding their identity (see “Judges” and Executioners, pt 2).

That was the discouraging conclusion of the Court after hearing Prudovsky’s arguments and statements from the Prosecutor-General’s Office and the Federal Security Service (FSB).

Lawyer Marina Agaltsova and plaintiff Sergei Prudovsky (photo Tatyana Britskaya, NG)

Commenting on this result, Prudovsky said, “It’s not healthy to name such names in today’s Russia but I shall go on doing so …”

Prudovsky outside doors of the Supreme Court (photo Tatyana Britskaya, NG)

For a full report, see Novaya gazeta, 8 December 2021 [R]

The following day Sergei Prudovsky added the following comment on Facebook, employing a mild expletive to express his frustration and disbelief at the ruling of the highest court in the land:

“In short, the Supreme Court equated the work methods of the NKVD with those of the FSB and acknowledged NKVD operatives as FSB officers. It’s effing unbelievable.”