Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 30 – Today, many
people in the Russian Federation will pause to remember the victims of
political repressions in the USSR, in particular the members of the 14 peoples
who were deported en masse and the 48 other nations who were deported or
otherwise repressed only in part, a list that even more tragically is far from
complete
While the regime of Vladimir Putin
increasingly defends what Stalin did and tries to block any memorialization of
his victims, Elena Meygun of Nazaccent.ru points out that “more than 700
memorials” to the victims of Stalinist repression nonetheless have been erected
across the country (nazaccent.ru/content/18158-obedinyayushaya-skorb.html).
Few
of them are in Moscow or in other major cities. Instead, they are at the sites
of former jails and camps, resettlement points, and mass graves. To give some
idea of the scope of this effort, she provides pictures and details of some of
them which show in her words that “the peoples of our country are united not
only by the word ‘Russian’ but by a common tragedy.”
On
this day, it is worth looking at these pictures and thinking about the millions
of human victims of a system whose collapse Putin has described as “the greatest
geopolitical tragedy” of the 20th century and, having viewed them,
recommitting ourselves to ensuring that there will be no more steps in the
direction of recreating it.
And
unfortunately, such a recommitment is necessary not only morally but
practically. As Crimean Tatar Mustafa Dzhemilyev reminds today, Moscow is
engaged in an analogous act of ethnic engineering and genocide in occupied
Crimea by forcing Crimean Tatars out and sending ethnic Russians in (qha.com.ua/ru/obschestvo/krim-zaselyayut-rossiyanami/150286/).
Meygun’s
gallery of memorials and the groups for which they were set up include:
·
The
Cossacks, who erected a memorial cross at a cemetery in Kotlas in the Far North
in 2003 and another at the resettlement camp in Makarikha.
·
The
Lithuanians who set up a memorial in the Komi Republic in 1990 in honor of the
Lithuanians who were deported there after the illegal annexation of their
country.
·
The
Russian Germans who erected a memorial in Karelia.
·
The
Poles who set one up in St. Petersburg in 1993.
·
The
Ingush and Chechens who put up a memorial in Nazran in 1997 to those who were
deported to Kazakhstan and Central Asia.
·
The
Kalmyks who erected a monument in their capital Elista in 1996 to those who had
been deported and then able to return.
·
The
Karachays who put one up in 2014 in an aul in the Karachayevo-Chekess Republic.
·
The
Estonians who erected a memorial cross in Norilsk in 1991 in honor of those
Estonians who perished there.
·
The
Jews who put up a memorial in Medvezhegorsk in Karelia in 2005to the Jews who
died not only in 1937-1938 but throughout the Soviet period.
·
The
Ukrainians who set up a memorial in Khakasia to which many of them were deported.
It was dedicated in August 2000.
·
The
Latvians who erected a monument to Latvians who died in deportation in the Komi
Republic in 1989.
·
The
Greeks who put up a memorial in Krasnodar in 2011 to victims from among that
nation.
·
The
Koreans who put up a small memorial to their losses in Shcherbinka, near
Moscow.
·
The
Mongolians who did the same also in Moscow oblast.
·
The
Yakuts (Sakha) who put up a monument in Arkhangelsk in 2009.
·
The
Asssyrians who erected a memorial in St. Petersburg in 2000 to those of their
nation who lost their lives in the GULAG.
·
The
Ingermanland Finns who set up a memorial also in the Northern Capital in 1994.
·
The
Balkars who have a memorial in their republic to those deported and killed.
·
The
Belarusians who set up a memorial in the Komi Republic in 1999.
·
And
the Crimean Tatars who have memorials in Feodosia and Yevpatoria, some of which
have been vandalized since the Russian occupation of that Ukrainian peninsula.
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