Russians instal memorials to victims of Stalinist repression

Among the few who dared talk about Josef Stalin’s political repressions, building No 5 on the corner of Moscow’s Dolgorukovskaya Street became known as a “house of widows”. It’s only now, six decades after the tyrannical Soviet leader’s death, that this and other disturbing landmarks of the Great Terror in the Russian capital are finally being commemorated.

Over the past few weeks volunteers have begun installing personalised steel plaques on residential buildings in Moscow to mark the former homes of victims of Soviet political repressions. Organisers hope that the "Last Address" commemorative project will eventually spread across Russia as a visual reminder of one of the darkest pages in the country's turbulent history.

A million people executed

Historians say about one million people were executed in purges unleashed between 1933 and 1951 as Stalin moved to rid the Soviet Union of anyone disloyal to his murderous regime. Millions more met an early death after being sent to gulags or prison camps, often on flimsy or trumped up charges.

After Stalin died in 1953 hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were politically rehabilitated – many of them posthumously – and some prison camps were closed. But it was only when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Russian secret police began opening their archives that details of the repressions became publicly available.

“Commemorating the crimes and mistakes of the past is a way to ensure they are never repeated,” says Alyona Kozlova, the head of archives at Memorial, a human rights and research group that has over the past two decades documented the repressions of the Soviet era as well as gathering data about current political prisoners. “People need to understand what can happen when too much power is concentrated in the hands of one leader and there is a personality cult.”

Sergei Parkhomenko, a Russian journalist who initiated the Last Address, was inspired by Germany's Stolpersteine or Stumbling Block memorial that uses personalised cobblestones set outside the former homes of victims of Nazi oppression to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive.

Unusual as an example of a civic project in Russia, the Last Address has raised about 1.5 million roubles (€21,000) in a crowd funding campaign, but has received no state support.

With a motto “one person, one plaque,” the project works by inviting people to propose a victim they wish to be remembered and pay the 4,000-rouble (€56) cost of inscribing the memorial.

Some 500 victims have been proposed for commemoration so far, their broad range of professions – a priest, a carpenter and a pianist, several engineers and bureaucrats as well as an invalid condemned to death for spying for Japan – a testimony to the sweeping and indiscriminate scale of the repressions that, according to Memorial’s files, claimed the lives of more than 40,000 people in the Russian capital alone.

Some participants have nominated relatives, finally uncovering to the public gaze the once shameful family secrets of their Soviet past. Others have put forward the names of strangers “who have no one to speak for them and remember,” said Ms Kozlova.

As the Last Address project went live in December, a small crowd gathered to watch as Sergei Parkhomenko climbed a ladder to install the first four memorial plaques on the wall of No 5 Dolgorukovskaya Street and lay red carnations at their side. If local residents agree, many more similar ceremonies could follow at the building where at least 65 people were arrested during Stalin’s time and carried away to face trial and death by firing squad.

One reason why reconciliation is complicated in Russia is that the Kremlin has not yet developed a consistent narrative of the Soviet past. Vladimir Putin has condemned the repressions, but has also held up Stalin as a strong ruler who led the Soviet Union to victory in the second World War and built his country into a superpower to rival the USA.

An all powerful state that

Another factor is that the paternalistic system of governance Putin has established is based on the traditional Tsarist and Stalinist model of an all powerful state that, its influence bolstered by the security forces, is suspicious of any sign of disloyalty among its subjects.

Although the FSB, the successor of the Soviet KGB, has begun restricting access to its archives of late, it would be unfair to say that the Russian government takes no interest in memorials to the Soviet repressions. Only this year Moscow city decided to expand the Gulag Museum and allocated a larger premises for the project in the capital. “The authorities like to have control over the (remembering) process,” said Kozlova. “We will have to see where this will lead.”

Meanwhile, the outlook is clouded for organizations that have explored the appalling human cost of Stalin's rule. After threatening to close down Memorial this year, Russia's justice ministry has turned its fire on the Sakharov Center, a human rights group that, among other activities, runs a museum dedicated to the years of Soviet repression and the courage shown by the dissident movement.

In a move that drew an immediate rebuke from the European Commission, the Russian justice ministry on December 25th forcibly included the Sakharov Center on its list of so called "foreign agents," a term that, placing the bearer under intense official scrutiny, has carried negative connotations since Stalin's time.