On October 30, Russia celebrates the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression. The tragedy of the first half of the 20th century affected the fate of very, very many citizens of the country who fell into the millstone of mass arrests, evictions, and executions. A memorable date was the events of October 30, 1974, when political prisoners of the Mordovian and Perm camps went on a hunger strike in protest against political repression in the USSR. Since then, Soviet political prisoners have celebrated October 30 every year as Political Prisoner Day. Officially, the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression was first celebrated in 1991 in accordance with the resolution of the Supreme Council of the RSFSR.

During the years of Soviet power, millions of people were subjected to mass repression for political reasons. The years 1937-1938 are called the Great Terror, which marked the peak of repression. In 2012, it was 75 years since the beginning of those tragic events, when they began to implement order 00447 “On the operation to repress former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements.” Thus began the operation to combat “enemies of the people.” The personnel purge affected party leaders, the economic, political and creative elite. The trial in June 1937 of Tukhachevsky, Yakir and other military leaders became a signal for mass repressions among the military. Over 40 thousand people were injured, and 45 percent of the command staff was “purged” from the ranks of the army as politically unreliable. The army approached the war practically decapitated. The tragedy ruined the fates of not only the repressed themselves; members of their families were persecuted and oppressed. “Daughter” or “son of an enemy of the people” became an indelible mark for the children of the repressed. In total, during the years of the Great Terror, 1.3 million people were convicted, 682 thousand of whom were executed.

However, mass repressions were carried out both before 1937 and after the era of personnel purges. In the 20s, the most severe measures were taken against the peasant population. During the years of collectivization, more than a million peasant farms were dispossessed, about five million people were expelled from their homes to settlements.

In the pre-war period, not only military leaders, party leadership and the so-called “kulaks” became victims of mass terror. Among the endless stream of those repressed were ordinary people who, out of hunger, collected ears of corn in the fields or the collective farm potatoes left after harvesting. They were also sent to camps for failure to comply with the workday quota and violation of labor discipline. To turn out to be an enemy of the people, sometimes one denunciation was enough. The clergy were also dealt with with particular cruelty, repressing more than 200 thousand people.

There was a mass eviction of entire peoples. The victims of deportation were Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Kurds, Koreans, Buryats and other peoples. 3.5 million is the number of people repressed on ethnic grounds from the mid-40s to 1961. Persons of German nationality were evicted from the Volga region, Moscow, the Moscow region and other regions. The deportation affected 14 nations entirely and 48 partially.

During the years of Soviet power, millions of people were subjected to mass repressions for political reasons, and the exact number of victims has not yet been established. According to surviving documents alone, between 1921 and 1953, 4 million 60 thousand people were repressed, including 799,455 sentenced to death.

The process of rehabilitation of victims of political repression began with the report of the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Nikita Khrushchev “On the cult of personality and its consequences” at the 20th Congress of the CPSU on February 25, 1956. In the 50-60s, more than 500 thousand people were rehabilitated. In the second half of the 60s, the rehabilitation process actually stopped and was resumed only in the 90s, with the signing of the decree of the President of the USSR “On restoring the rights of all victims of political repression of the 20-50s.”

On October 18, 1991, the Russian Federation Law “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression” was adopted, which provides for the restoration of civil rights to victims of repression, the elimination of other consequences of arbitrariness on the part of the state, and the provision of compensation for material and moral damage.

The rehabilitation process also applies to foreign citizens who have been subjected to repression for political reasons. Appeals for rehabilitation come from more than twenty countries around the world. The Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation has rehabilitated more than 15 thousand foreign citizens.

In total, according to the Prosecutor General's Office, almost 800 thousand people have been rehabilitated and 1 million criminal cases have been reviewed. Among those rehabilitated are more than 10 thousand children who were together with their parents in places of imprisonment, exile or deportation.

In memory of the victims of repression, memorial complexes and monuments were opened in Irkutsk, Nazran /Ingushetia/, Tver region /State memorial complex "Mednoye"/, Yaroslavl, Smolensk region /State memorial complex "Katyn"/, Kazan /Victory Park complex/ , Gorno-Altaisk, Vladivostok /Memory Alley/, Artyom, Nakhodka, Ufa, Makhachkala, Arkhangelsk, Volzhsky, Norilsk /memorial complex in memory of the victims of the "Norillag"/ and other cities of Russia.

In Moscow and the immediate Moscow region, memorial signs have been installed in places of mass graves of victims of political repression: at the Vagankovskoye cemetery of the Moscow / Donskoy / crematorium. On the territory of the Butovo training ground, a Cathedral was erected in honor of the new martyrs. A memorial sign - the Solovetsky Stone - was installed on Lubyanka Square. On October 29, 2007, a monument to the victims of political repression was unveiled in the town of Bronnitsy near Moscow.

It was such a terrible time.

The enemy of the people was the people themselves.

Any word, any topic...

N oh we remember! Now we know.

There are bans on everything, a seal on everyone...

The crowd of people was driven along the stage,

To make it easier to manage...

On July 2, 1937, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution PB-51/94 “On Anti-Soviet Elements.” In pursuance of this, on August 5, 1937, the NKVD of the USSR issued order No. 0044, which marked the beginning of the operation of mass purges. By mid-November 1938, 681,692 death sentences had been issued without trial and carried out immediately. More than 1.7 million people were sent to camps.

Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression - takes place in Russia and other former USSR republics annually on October 30, starting in 1991. On this day, rallies and various cultural events are held, during which victims of political repression are remembered; some schools organize “live” history lessons to which witnesses to these tragic events are invited.

According to the Memorial human rights center, there are about 800 thousand victims in Russia (according to the Law on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, their number also includes children left without parental care).

Traditional venues for rallies and mourning events

- amara : Sign of memory in the park named after. Gagarin (during excavation work in this park, one of the places of mass graves of executed repressed people was discovered).

-Tomsk : A square in memory of the victims of Stalin's repressions, located next to the former NKVD building, which now houses the memorial museum "NKVD Investigation Prison". The Stone of Sorrow is installed in the park. In total, during the years of Stalin’s repressions, about 20 thousand Tomsk residents suffered from them.

Memorial stone to those politically repressed in Omsk:

Historical reference

October 30, 1974 - 36 years ago - Political Prisoner Day was marked by one- and two-day hunger strikes in the Mordovian and Perm camps, as well as in the Vladimir prison. This breadth of coverage was unwittingly facilitated by the camp administration, which suspected that something was being prepared and could not find anything better than to scatter the “conspirators” into different camps. The last place where they learned about the Day of Political Prisoners was Vladimir Prison.

At the same time, on October 30, A.D. Sakharov and the initiative group for the defense of human rights in the USSR organized a press conference.

Correspondents were given open letters from prisoners and other materials received from the camps and written specifically for the Day of Political Prisoners. Among them were letters, appeals and interviews with prisoners in Mordovian and Perm camps so that Mordovian materials could see the light of day.

Subsequently, Political Prisoner Day was also celebrated with hunger strikes in the camps. The largest number of participants in protests in the camps was noted in 1981, when about 300 political prisoners took part in hunger strikes and strikes.

Since 1978, the Country and World Society has annually published on October 30 the “List of Political Prisoners of the USSR.”

Since 1987, Political Prisoner Day has been accompanied by demonstrations in Moscow, Leningrad, Lvov, Tbilisi, etc. If dozens of people took part in the first demonstrations, then in 1988 there were already hundreds; the number of participants in the “human chain” organized by the public organization “Memorial” around the KGB building on October 30, 1989 was already from 2 to 10 thousand, and demonstrations took place in dozens cities from Kaliningrad to Irkutsk. In 1987-1988, demonstrations were dispersed, and their active participants (V.V. Navodvorskaya) were arrested for 15 days. Later, the authorities came to terms with the demonstrations; in 1990, KGB representatives even laid a wreath at the Solovetsky Stone.

On October 30, 1990, on Dzerzhinsky Square (now Lubyanka), a boulder was installed, brought from the Solovetsky Islands, where in the 20s-30s of the last century there was one of the most terrible Soviet camps - the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp (SLON), in which About a million people were killed. The inscription was carved on the stone: “This stone was delivered from the territory of the Solovetsky special purpose camp by the Memorial Society and installed in memory of the millions of victims of the totalitarian regime on October 30, 1990, the Day of Political Prisoners in the USSR.” The funeral service for those killed was celebrated by Father Gleb Yakunin.

From that moment on, Solovetsky Stone became one of those places in Moscow where victims of repression can remember their relatives and friends.

In 1991, by decision of the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation, October 30 was declared a national day of remembrance for victims of political repression. And on October 18, 1991, the Law of the Russian Federation “On the rehabilitation of victims of political repression” was adopted.

The state admitted guilt to the citizens of its country for the crimes of the Bolshevik party-Soviet regime.

In 2004, by Decree of the Governor of the Omsk Region, the Committee for the Protection of the Rights of Rehabilitated Victims of Political Repression of the Administration of the Government of the Omsk Region was created.

“...The future of Russia and its people does not lie in returning to the past, but in moving forward, in persistent and persistent creative work. The older generation, who survived the repressions, remembers this tragic time. Victims of political terror appeal to the memory of their descendants. Our duty is to restore historical justice, to justify the honest names of the slandered and innocently repressed citizens of Russia.” These are the words from the Omsk Book of Memory of Victims of Political Repression “Not Subject to Oblivion,” created over the course of more than ten years by the creative editorial team by order of Governor L.K. Polezhaev (1995).

The published eleven volumes of the Book of Memory are a stunningly powerful historical document, composed of painfully brief, just a few lines, descriptions of the destinies of innocently convicted people: born, worked, arrested, convicted under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, shot (in bold) or served his sentence... rehabilitated for lack of corpus delicti. Thirty-two thousand of our fellow countrymen, forever written in alphabetical order on the pages of eleven 400-page volumes! The Book also contains more detailed essays about the fates of those repressed, as well as documents from that time, and other materials.

In an interview with the newspaper “Omsky Vestnik” dated July 25, 2007, “Crying over the hair, removing the head,” an employee of the book’s editorial office, a member of the Union of Writers of Russia, the famous poetess Tatyana Georgievna Chetverikova says: “The published eleven volumes of the Book of Memory, as it seems to us, in some This has changed the climate in the region. He became warmer and more trusting, because thousands of Omsk residents learned about the fate of their loved ones who died during the years of repression. Many, many good names of citizens, our fellow countrymen were restored: peasants, workers, doctors, teachers, clergy...". The State Archive of the Omsk Region contains about thirty thousand files on repressed peasants. There is a need to publish new volumes of the Book of Memory dedicated to the dispossession of peasants: the robbery and expulsion of thousands and thousands of families from their native land.

“...Most of the victims were children. Those who had to grow up with an unhealed wound in their hearts and yet, in a difficult hour for their homeland, stand up and protect it at the cost of their lives. They and their parents, hardworking peasants, deserve to be remembered so that there are no broken links in the chain of our family trees. This is especially important for our children, let them know how deep and strong their roots are in their native land.”

In 1991, by decision of the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation, October 30 was declared a national day of remembrance for victims of political repression. On this day, former prisoners, their relatives and friends gather at memorial signs and at mass grave sites to honor the memory of the victims and demonstrate their firm commitment to never allow a return to lawlessness.

The Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression is a special day. This is a sad date in our history. It is impossible to leave it without the attention of the younger generation, since historical and artistic material on this issue contributes to the formation of civic qualities of the individual, an active life position, and makes it possible to form the moral foundations of every young person. At the same time, this is a complex and controversial date - the day of repentance of the state before its people, and when holding events on this topic, it is necessary to present any information related to this topic as objectively and historically as possible.

Events dedicated to the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression are recommended to be carried out with middle and high school students. On this topic, you can design exhibitions, hold rallies, memorial hours, invite real witnesses and participants in the tragic events of the past, design stands and library posters, discuss literary works dedicated to the topic of the consequences of the regime of political terror for an individual, people, and the state as a whole (Shalamov V .T. - “Kolyma Tales”, A.A. Akhmatova - “Requiem”, A.I. Solzhenitsyn - “The Gulag Archipelago”, E.I. Zamyatin - “We”, A.P. Platonov . The purpose of such events is to arouse in schoolchildren interest and an emotional response to the events of the history of our country during the times of totalitarianism and Stalinist repression, and to form an idea of ​​​​the inadmissibility of state lawlessness against citizens.

Annex 1.

Full text of Dmitry Medvedev's address

on the occasion of the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression (2009)

Today is the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression. 18 years have passed since this day appeared on the calendar as a memorable date.

I am convinced that the memory of national tragedies is as sacred as the memory of victories. And it is extremely important that young people have not only historical knowledge, but also civic feelings. They were able to emotionally empathize with one of the greatest tragedies in Russian history. But here everything is not so simple.

Two years ago, sociologists conducted a survey - almost 90% of our citizens, young citizens aged 18 to 24, could not even name the names of famous people who suffered or died from repression in those years. And this, of course, cannot but worry.

It is impossible to imagine the scale of the terror from which all the peoples of the country suffered. Its peak occurred in 1937–1938. Alexander Solzhenitsyn called the endless “stream” of those repressed at that time “the Volga of people’s grief.” Over the course of 20 pre-war years, entire strata and classes of our people were destroyed. The Cossacks were practically eliminated. The peasantry was dispossessed and bled dry. The intelligentsia, workers, and military personnel were subjected to political persecution. Representatives of absolutely all religious denominations were persecuted.

October 30 is the Day of Remembrance of millions of crippled destinies. About people shot without trial or investigation, about people sent to camps and exile, deprived of civil rights for the “wrong” occupation or for the notorious “social origin.” The stigma of “enemies of the people” and their “accomplices” then fell on entire families.

Let's just think about it: millions of people have died as a result of terror and false accusations - millions. They were deprived of all rights. Even the rights to a decent human burial, and for many years their names were simply erased from history.

But you can still hear that these numerous victims were justified by some higher state goals.

I am convinced that no development of the country, no successes, no ambitions can be achieved at the cost of human grief and loss.

Nothing can be placed above the value of human life.

And there is no justification for repression.

We pay a lot of attention to the fight against falsification of our history. And for some reason we often believe that we are talking only about the inadmissibility of revising the results of the Great Patriotic War.

But it is no less important to prevent, under the guise of restoring historical justice, the justification of those who destroyed their people.

It is also true that Stalin’s crimes cannot detract from the exploits of the people who won the Great Patriotic War. Made our country a powerful industrial power. Raised our industry, science, and culture to the world level.

It is equally important to study the past, overcome indifference and the desire to forget its tragic sides. And no one except ourselves will do this.

A year ago, in September, I was in Magadan. The Ernst Neizvestny Memorial “Mask of Sorrow” made a deep impression on me. After all, it was erected not only with public funds, but also with donations.

We need museum and memorial centers that will pass on the memory of what we experienced from generation to generation. Of course, work must continue to search for places of mass graves, restore the names of the victims, and, if necessary, their rehabilitation.

Without the complex history, the essentially contradictory history of our state, it is often simply impossible to understand the roots of many of our problems, the difficulties of today's Russia.

But I would like to say again: no one but ourselves will solve our problems. It will not instill in children respect for the law, respect for human rights, for the value of human life, for moral standards that originate in our national traditions and in our religion.

No one except ourselves will preserve historical memory and pass it on to new generations.

Appendix 2.

Repression: how it happened

Scenario for the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression

The music “Requiem” is playing.

1st presenter: Good afternoon dear friends! Our meeting is held on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression. And we will begin it with verses:

1st presenter: October 30 was not chosen as the Day of Victims of Repression by chance: 19 years before, this day was chosen, if you like, by God. On this day in 1972, Yuri Galanskov died in a Mordovian camp, having received a sentence for his protest against the imprisonment of Sinyavsky and Daniel, writers convicted of publishing their stories abroad.

Two years later, in October 1974, a group of Galanskov’s convicts managed to convey to the public a proposal to celebrate this day throughout the world as the Day of Political Prisoners. This is what was accepted by the international community. And it was carried out in Soviet camps - through hunger strikes - despite the inevitable punishment cells, bans on visits, transfers to prison regime and other delights. Until 1974, another date was celebrated as the Day of Political Prisoners - September 5 - the anniversary of the famous decree of 1918 “On the Red Terror”, which, in addition to the execution of “all persons related to White Guard organizations, conspiracies and rebellions, introduced concentration camps in Soviet Russia...”.

2nd presenter:The presidential decree marked the new state's break with the repressive Soviet regime. To what extent this gap is confirmed by new practice, we can judge for ourselves.

But did the president, when signing his decree, think about the fact that the word “repression” hardly corresponds to what happened with the establishment of Soviet power in our country.

3rd presenter:Not the thousands of engineers arrested in connection with the “Shakhty case”; nor the hundreds of thousands tortured, shot, and killed in 1937–1938. party members who naively believed that they, the mind, honor and conscience of the era, were building a bright future for all working people; nor the millions of peasants who believed in the “new economic policy” announced in 1921 and who, 7 years later, found themselves victims of the “policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class.” Neither the executed marshals and generals - almost the entire Soviet generals, nor the poets: Gumilyov, Tabidze, Smelyakov, Zabolotsky - fought against the authorities; neither the artists - Ruslanova, Dvorzhetsky, Mikhoels, nor the author of the trajectory of the future American flight to the Moon Kondratyuk, or the future head of the Soviet space program Korolev, or the aircraft designer Tupolev, nor the geneticists Vavilov, Pantin, Timofeev-Resovsky, nor our physicist Rumer, astronomer Kozyrev, historian Gumilyov, not the completely destroyed Jewish anti-fascist committee, not the victims of the post-war “Leningrad affair”, not to mention the millions of captured soldiers...

The largest camps in which prisoners served their sentences were located on Solovki and Kolyma. The conditions of detention of prisoners in these camps led to large casualties. The security on Solovki consisted of OGPU employees who were convicted of sins in their service and were sent to Solovki for correction. And they did arbitrariness there. New prisoners were greeted with the words: “This is not the Soviet Republic, but the Solovetsky Republic!” Get it! The prosecutor has never set foot on Solovetsky soil, and never will! Know! You weren't sent here to fix it! You can’t fix a hunchback.”

Life was like a theater of the absurd. They published their own magazine “Solovetsky Islands”. And since 1926, an All-Union subscription was announced for it. There was also its own drama group, because there were a lot of cultural figures there. And botanists and art historians were members of the Solovetsky Society of Local History.

There were only two escapes from the Solovetsky Islands. There were different measures for killing people. Of the 84 thousand, 43 thousand people died.

Over the years, 2.5 million people served their sentences in Kolyma, of which 950 thousand died. They died from exhaustion and related diseases. The size of the ration became the main means for the camp administration to force prisoners to give all their best at work. Shock workers were entitled to increased rations and the possibility of early release, and those who did not fulfill the quota had their rations mercilessly cut.

Since 1938, they began to carry out mass executions, thereby getting rid of unwanted prisoners.

4th presenter: This is not repression , This - stupid violence, which can’t even be called political. Simply the violence of power, which feels itself to be power only in acts of violence, the more causeless, the more delightful!

The Soviet regime did not invent anything new in this regard. If you think about it, violenceserved as the main productive force. True, this system was unable to produce anything but violence. But she produced this on an expanding scale.

1st presenter:Years of the “Great Terror”(1937-38) claimed a hitherto unknown number of lives of our compatriots. They even amaze officially published results of this company: 1,344,923 arrested, 681,692 executed.The famous historian R. Conquest gives other numbers: 12-14 million arrested, at least 1 million. shot; Commission of the Central Committee (1962) and even more: 19 million arrested, at least 7 million executed.

As it were, both names - Yezhovshchina and the Great Terror - are inaccurate. The NKVD, which carried out mass arrests and executions in those years, was indeed headed by N. Yezhov, but the idea of ​​this action was not his. If we were to associate this with someone’s name, then we should call the word Stalinism. Suffice it to remember that during the great terror, members of the Central Committee were destroyed - almost all of Lenin’s closest associates, 95% of the top generals - the creators of Lenin’s Red Army. All of them are by no means enemies of Stalin, much less of the Soviet regime.

1st reader:

These are lines from Anna Akhmatova's Requiem.During the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, she spent seventeen months in prison lines in Leningrad. One day someone “identified” her. Then the woman standing behind her with blue lips, who, of course, had never heard her name in her life, woke up from her characteristic daze and asked her in her ear (everyone there spoke in a whisper):

– Can you describe this?

And Akhmatova said:

- Can.

Then something like a smile crossed what had once been her face.

2nd reader:

2nd presenter: The Great Terror was carefully planned - as a kind of military operation. Moreover, the murder of Kirov on December 1, 1934 only outwardly looked like a reason for unleashing terror; rather, it was one of the measures of his personnel and psychological preparation.

The plan of the Great Terror itself, with a breakdown of the entire population into groups and categories, percentage standards for each category and limits on arrests and executions by region and republic, was submitted by Yezhov for approval by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on July 2, 1937. Liquidation or imprisonment was subject to not only the remnants of the “hostile classes” (including children), former members of hostile parties and participants in the white movement (and their children), but also communists - former members of all opposition movements in the CPSU (b) - 383 lists of the most prominent party and government figures.

3rd reader:

3rd presenter:Ideologically, the Great Terror was justified back in 1928 by Stalin’s thesis about the intensification of the class struggle as we move towards socialism; this thesis was proven by the repressions themselves: “Shakhtinsky trial” - summer of 1928, more than 2000 engineers were arrested, 5 of them were shot; the process of the “Industrial Party” - 1930, Chayanov and Kondratiev - world-class economists - were shot; “case of sabotage at power plants” - 1933, hundreds of specialists were arrested in Moscow, Chelyabinsk, Zlatoust, Baku.

4th reader:

4th presenter:On November 25, 1938, Beria was appointed to the post of People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, most of the Yezhov investigators were arrested and shot, 327,400 “Yezhov” prisoners were released. Yezhov himself was appointed People's Commissar of Water Transport, then this People's Commissariat was abolished, and Yezhov was arrested and shot. But his arrest, trial and execution were never officially reported; only the word “Yezhovshchina” appeared in the language, but it was not used officially either.

Counting in the millions, the number of victims of the Great Terror remains uncertain; their burial places are discovered by chance. The heirs of the NKVD are doing everything to prevent the publication of the executed lists. For example, a mass grave was discovered in Karelia near Medvezhyegorsk. Here on October 27, 1937, 1,111 people were shot.

5th reader:

2nd presenter:But there was another result of BT - the one for which all these hecatombs of corpses were piled up - the completion of the creation of a system of violence as the productive force of society. This is also mentioned above. One way or another, the “cleansing”, to use modern slang, was carried out, although its terms had to be extended twice, as well as regional limits on executions had to be increased (based on requests from the localities). Socialism, as the leader and teacher understood it, was “basically” built on 1/6 of the land. It was possible to move on to preparing its distribution to the remaining 5/6.

Music sounds. Oginsky’s Polonaise “Farewell to the Motherland.”

1st presenter:Dear guests! We wish you health, long life, a prosperous old age, prosperity for you and your families, and also to be insured against various disasters and surprises!

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Appendix 3.

There can be no oblivion

Scenario of literary and musical composition,

dedicated to the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression

To everyone who was branded under Article fifty-eight,

who even in a dream was surrounded by dogs, a fierce escort,

who in court, without trial, by special meeting

was doomed to a prison uniform until the grave,

who was betrothed to fate with shackles, thorns, chains,

Our tears and sorrow belong to them, our eternal memory!

Tariverdiev “Two in a cafe”, 3. Slide War

Many severe trials, sacrifices, and hardships befell our country in the 20th century. Two world wars and a civil war, famine and

Devastation and political instability claimed tens of millions of lives, forcing the reconstruction of the destroyed country again and again.

But even against this background, political repression became a terrible page in our history. Moreover, humiliated and destroyed

the best of the best, who never even dreamed of fighting against their people. Thousands of engineers, hundreds of thousands tortured, executed,

ruined party members, millions of peasants who found themselves victims of dispossession, marshals and generals, scientists and poets, writers and artists who were truly devoted to the Motherland.

Chopin "E minor", 4. Slide "boy"

Nowadays we know incredible numbers of people executed, repressed, imprisoned, and scattered in orphanages.

Only according to incomplete data their number exceeds ten million people. The system fought against completely innocent people, inventing an enemy for itself,

and then mercilessly destroying these people.

Doga “Waltz”, 5. Slide “Burning Candle”

Much has been written about the mass repressions of the 1930s. Many camp memoirs and manuscripts of former prisoners of Kolyma and the Gulag have been published, and documents from the NKVD archives have become available. But the most impassive witnesses in the court of history are letters from camp prisoners.

“Polonaise” by Oginsky, 8. Slide "Archival documents"

Letter

May 5, 1938 “My dear Anechka, Lorochka and Lyalechka! Yesterday we were brought to Kotlas. We are now at the transit point of the Ukhtapechora NKVD camp. From here they must be sent to a place where they will have to serve out their long term of camp imprisonment. When and where the shipment will take place is unknown. What kind of work you will have to do is also still unknown...”

July 8, 1938 “.. I am writing from the Ustvymlag transit point. They brought me here the day before yesterday, and from here they will take me further to Zheldorlag. It seems that this will be the last stage of our journey to the place of our imprisonment... My whole soul, my whole spirit is only you, my dears. Don't forget yours

unfortunate daddy... Be healthy. I kiss you deeply, deeply. Your father"

September 11, 1938 “...Today I am sent for treatment to point 42, and from there to Knyazh-Pogost, obviously, to an inpatient hospital. Bye

It doesn't matter to me at all. I’m all swollen and swollen, I can’t walk, I’m suffocating. But I hope that all this is a temporary phenomenon and with good treatment in the hospital

Everything will pass quickly and I will be able to work. Be healthy. I kiss you deeply, deeply. Your father"

Chopin "E minor" 9. Slide “Crying wives”

The largest camps in which prisoners served their sentences were located on Solovki and Kolyma. Conditions of detention

prisoners in these camps resulted in great loss of life.

With the receipt of operational order No. 00486 of August 15, 1937, arrests of wives of traitors to the Motherland began throughout the country.

10-11. Slide "Camps"

Tariverdiev “Two in a cafe”, 12. Slide "Father's arrest", 13. Letter

From the memoirs of the daughter of the professor, head of the department of Kazan University, Deputy People's Commissar of Education of the TASSR Galina Tarasova:

“Father was arrested on the night of January 26-27, 1937. The days of bewildered silence and fear have come. Every night they took away one of the neighbors. Our yard is empty, no children. They stopped coming to our house. Neither my mother nor my brother and I believed that our father was guilty. In March, the director called my mother and offered to leave work of her own free will. We had absolutely nothing to live on. On the night of August 20-21, my mother was arrested. When she was arrested, she was told that she did not need to take anything with her. So in prison she ended up wearing only a summer dress, but in the camp she went barefoot. Kind people shared their clothes with her when she walked along the stage, barely alive.

For two years she did not know where her children were or what was happening to them. Mom will sit in the corner of the cell, look at the constantly burning light bulb and remain silent. My brother and I were sent to an orphanage.”

Melody Clauderman, 14. Slide "Burning tree"

As throughout the country, repressions in the Omsk region were widespread and affected all layers of society. In total, about 32,000 people were affected.

15. Slide shoe

In our village there are witnesses to those ancient and terrible events. They were torn from their usual life, experienced hunger and cold, and separation from relatives.

Tariverdiev “Two in a cafe”, 16-37 Slides “Repressed”

How can family forget? Karl Emmanuilovich Shaibel about that terrible time? A wave of repression overtook their family in 1941. They lived in the Saratov region, in the Volga region. He even remembers the exact date to this day - August 28. My father was taken to the labor army, and the entire village was told to take no more than one suitcase with them and prepare for eviction. He was then four years old. They were evicted to the Tyumen region, Ishim station. They were separated from their mother, she was sent to the labor army, and he and his younger brother, who was a little over a year old, were sent to an orphanage. They stayed there for three months, and the fear of getting lost forced them to hold hands the entire time. By some incredibly lucky chance, when they were about to evacuate the orphanage, it turned out that the mother was working nearby. And it’s quite a miracle that she managed to get them out, beg them from the authorities, take them from the orphanage with her. And now they are already traveling in calf carriages to Vorkuta, but the fear that they will now be separated again, taken away from their mother, makes them hide under bunk and beg mom not to tell anyone that they are there.

On the way, the only bundle was stolen and they were left in what they were wearing when they arrived at the place of settlement at the Zapolyarny state farm. It was a colony. They were housed in a barracks where more than 200 people lived. The mother worked for days, and they were left alone. The living conditions were unbearable: hunger, bedbugs, rats. Women with older children lived on the second tier, and with infants on the lower bunks. This is how rats chewed off babies' fingers while they slept. Karl Emmanuilovich remembers all this as if it were yesterday. All this time they knew nothing about their father. There was no news about him for 10 years. The mother wrote to all authorities, many times, repeatedly, and one day she received an answer that he was in Yakutia, in the gold mines. He answered their letters and even sent money so that the mother and children could come to him. Having received this money, she bought clothes for the children, and distributed the rest to the same lonely and needy women she lived next to. Later, the father himself returned to them, the family united. The children studied, Karl Emmanuilovich graduated from the Izhevsk Medical Institute and was assigned to Yakutia, where he met his future wife and moved with her to Muromtsevo. This is fate.

Stepushkina Lyubov Lavrovna. They had an ordinary peasant family - father, mother, five children. A little arable land, a house, a horse and a cow, one problem - my father was literate. They fell under dispossession. Everything was taken away from them, life became unbearable, and the father was forced to move with his family to the Krasnodar region to live with relatives. Living here already, he, perhaps by chance,

let slip that he was dispossessed, and later they found out that this was done through a denunciation. He was taken away and shot at the age of 45. Then half the village was arrested and the children were taken away in an unknown direction. Children were taken away from their mothers, but their mother hid in the cellars for a long time, so she saved all five. She raised them alone. Is it possible to convey how hard it was for her then? For everyone, they were enemies of the people, and wherever they turned for help, they were driven out from everywhere. The children had nothing to wear or put on. They waited for each other to grab clothes and go to school, even becoming swollen from hunger. But their mother came out, raised them all, and died without ever receiving news from their father. “Mom waited for him until her death, believed that he was alive, that he would return, he was not to blame for anything!” - Lyubov Lavrovna recalled. One day, to her next request to government agencies, she received an unexpectedly quick answer: he died in custody from anemia, and they even awarded him a pension. And in 1938, the NKVD “troika” sentenced him to death. They were shot in a prison in Minusinsk on the banks of the Abakan River. There were many of them then, sentenced to death, they were taken ashore, shot, and the corpses were thrown into the river. To this day, Lyubov Lavrovna remembers everything.

Photo: International Memorial / Svetlana Mishina

At least 12 million people are officially recognized as victims of political repression in Russia. Of these, approximately 5 million were arrested and convicted on political charges by judicial or extrajudicial authorities, and approximately 7 million were subjected to administrative repression. We are talking, in particular, about peasants who suffered during collectivization and people deported from territories annexed by the USSR in 1939-1940. On the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression, which has been celebrated since 1991, memorial events are held throughout the country.

First

On October 25, the exhibition “Firsts” opened at the International Memorial. The exhibition consists of portraits and biographies of 50 people who became the first victims of Soviet political repression. “Our exhibition is about the inherently repressive nature of the Soviet state. Everything that will happen later - the Red Terror of the Civil War era, the Great Terror of the 1930s, 70 years of censorship oppression and the brutal fight against dissent, extrajudicial executions - everything was laid down, programmed already in the first days and weeks of Soviet power. Talk about vegetarianism among the Bolsheviks these days is a myth based on nothing. Arrests from the very beginning became a symbolic sign of the “post-October” era,” says the curator of the exhibition Boris Belenkin.

The exhibition “The First” was created on the basis of photographs, archival documents (investigative case materials) and newspaper publications from the end of 1917. It will work in the hall of the International Memorial until January 25, 2018, every day except Saturday and Sunday, from 11.00 to 19.00.

Return of names

On the eve of the memorable date, October 29, the “Return of Names” campaign will traditionally take place. In 2017, the promotion will be ten years old. According to tradition in Moscow, it will last 12 hours without a break. From 10.00 to 22.00 on Lubyanka Square, citizens will read the names of people shot in the capital. Despite the fact that the square is closed due to reconstruction, passage to the Solovetsky Stone, the oldest monument to victims of the totalitarian regime in Russia, will be open for participants of the action. According to Memorial, more than 40 thousand people were shot in Moscow during the years of terror.

“Return of Names” will take place not only in Moscow. In 2017, 39 cities in Russia and abroad will join the action, the executive director of the International Memorial told Kommersant Elena Zhemkova. For the first time, the event will take place in the city of Borovsk, Kaluga region. It will be conducted by an artist Vladimir Ovchinnikov, which is engaged in the rehabilitation of victims of political repression and compiling books of memory. A monument to victims of political repression will also be unveiled in Borovsk, reports the NG-REGION portal. A stone brought from the Solovetsky Islands will be installed on Lenin Square. The full list of cities participating in the events on Memorial Day is published on the action website.

Topography of terror

October 29 in Moscow as part of the project “Moscow. Places of Memory" there will be a walking tour "Topography of Terror. Lubyanka and surroundings”, which will be conducted by a guide Pavel Gnilorybov. During the tour, you will be able to find out where the famous internal prison of Lubyanka was located, what the employees of the Execution House did at work, how to find the OGPU-NKVD-KGB garage-special vehicle depot in the center of Moscow, where, according to the most rough estimates, from 10 to 15 thousand people, etc. The route includes the NKVD building on Lubyanskaya Square, the house of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, the house of the Dynamo society, the monument to Vaclav Vorovsky, the NKVD reception room, the building where the Political Red Cross was located, the Cheka building, the execution yard and motor depot in Varsonofevsky Lane. Tours will begin at 14.00, 16.00, 18.00; the registration form is published on the International Memorial website.

Wall of Sorrow

On October 30, a national memorial to the victims of political repression, “The Wall of Sorrow,” will be opened in Moscow at the intersection of Sakharov Avenue and the Garden Ring. The project won an open competition for the development of an architectural and sculptural structure in memory of the victims of political repression. The decree on the construction of the monument was signed by the President in October 2015. Preparations for the implementation of the project, part of the funds for the installation of the monument were collected through donations. “Wall of Sorrow” was the first project of the Foundation “Perpetuating the Memory of Victims of Political Repression” (Memory Fund), created as part of the implementation of the Concept of State Policy to Perpetuate the Memory of Victims of Political Repression.

“The opening of the memorial to the victims of political repression is one of the truly historical events. This is the necessary repayment of the enormous and still unpaid debt of the twenty-first century generation to its twentieth-century predecessors. Remembering what happened means working for the benefit of the present and future of Russia. Thanks to participation in the Memory Fund project, every resident of our country had the opportunity to become involved in the creation of this important monument. Such a significant amount collected proves that society understands that it is necessary to preserve the memory of the victims of repression and is ready to actively support relevant initiatives. This is a huge incentive for the fund to continue its work,” says the chairman of the board of the Memory Fund Vladimir Lukin.

The memorial to the victims of mass repression will be open to citizens at 18.00.

Katyn

On October 30, the remains of Soviet citizens found during the improvement of the Russian part of the memorial will be reburied on the territory of the Katyn memorial complex in the Smolensk region, reports the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation. Thousands of people who died during the political repressions of the 1920s and 1930s are buried on the territory of the complex. In 2017, work on the reconstruction of the memorial was carried out by the Russian Military Historical Society and the Museum of Contemporary History of Russia. The project for the improvement of the Russian part of the complex was developed by the chairman of the board of the Union of Artists of the Russian Federation Andrey Kovalchuk, and special attention in the project is paid to the “Valley of Death”, where victims of political repression are buried.

No statute of limitations

On October 30, the Totemsky Museum of Local Lore (Vologda Region) will host a memorial event “Without a Statute of Limitations,” reports the online newspaper “Voice of the People.” Residents of the Totmsky district will get acquainted with the personal stories of repressed Totmich residents, with documents from the time of the Great Terror and the period of rehabilitation and will receive advice on where they can get information about repressed relatives, the director of the museum told the publication Alexey Novoselov. The promotion will start at 12.00.

Not subject to oblivion

The National Archives of Bashkortostan will open a documentary exhibition “Not Subject to Oblivion,” dedicated to mass repressions in the USSR, reports the news agency Bashinform. “The National Archive of the Republic of Bashkortostan has preserved a large number of documents that shed light on those tragic events. The materials exhibited at the exhibition make it possible to clearly trace the chronicle of those years: the policies of the totalitarian regime, dispossession and exposure of “sabotage doctors.” The documentary exhibition “Not Subject to Oblivion” is of interest to historians, local historians, journalists, teachers, students, high school students and a wide range of the public,” the publication quotes the words of the deputy director of the National Archives Niyaza Salimova. The exhibition opened on October 20 and will last until December 25.

Varlam Shalamov

The exhibition “Walking for Truth” will open in Syktyvkar, reports BNK. The event is dedicated to the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression and the 110th anniversary of the writer, prisoner of the Gulag Varlama Shalamova. The exhibition is dedicated to the life and work of Shalamov, the history of his family and the fate of the writer’s executed relatives. The exhibition was created with the assistance of the Komi Republican Charitable Public Foundation for Victims of Political Repression “Repentance” and will open on October 31 at the I.A. Literary Museum. Kuratova.

“Memory is like an oath, forever,
Yellow flame stings and burns
That's why infinity lives,
What a long memory lives in her!”
Anatoly Safronov

October 30 is the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression.
Soviet repressions. Stalin's repressions. Lenin's repressions.
Officially, this day was established by the resolution of the Supreme Council of the RSFSR dated October 18, 1991 “On the establishment of the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression.”

Political repressions in the USSR began from the first days of the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks under the leadership of Lenin, Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky and other similar “gentry” who declared themselves “representatives of the proletariat.”
It lasted throughout the years of the existence of the USSR. Under Stalin, a massive, brutal terror was carried out, legalized by Stalin, with torture and executions, with the arrests and sending to camps of the wives and children of “enemies of the people.” Political repressions turned into the so-called “persecution for anti-Soviet activities.”

“The peak of the most brutal repressions occurred in 1937-1938, when, according to official data, more than 1.5 million people were arrested on political charges, 1.3 million were convicted by extrajudicial authorities, and about 700 thousand were shot. The concept of “enemy of the people” entered the everyday life of Soviet people. By decision of the Politburo on July 5, 1937, the wives of “enemies of the people” were imprisoned in camps for a period of at least 5-8 years. Children of “enemies of the people” were either sent to camp colonies of the NKVD or placed in special regime orphanages.”

Many books and stories from the repressed themselves have been written about political repressions in the Soviet Union. Many writers came under repression. I will give the names of several of them:
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) - Russian writer, playwright, publicist, poet, public and political figure, Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature (1970).
Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982) - Russian Soviet prose writer and poet. The creator of one of the literary cycles about the life of prisoners in Soviet forced labor camps in 1930-1956.
Nikolai Zabolotsky (1903-1958) - Russian Soviet poet, translator. Nikolai Gumilyov (1886 – 1921) - Russian poet of the Silver Age, founder of the school of Acmeism, translator, literary critic, officer. Shot.
Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) - Russian poet, prose writer and translator, essayist, critic, literary critic. One of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century.
Yaroslav Smelyakov - Russian Soviet poet, translator. Laureate of the USSR State Prize (1967).
Lydia Chukovskaya (1907 - 1996) - editor, writer, poet, publicist, memoirist. Daughter of Korney Chukovsky.
Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) – Russian Soviet writer and poet.
Boris Pilnyak (1894–1938) – Russian Soviet writer, author of the book “The Roots of the Japanese Sun.” Shot.
Boris Kornilov (1907-1938) - Soviet poet and public figure-Komsomol member. Shot in Leningrad.
Yuri Dombrovsky (1909-1978) - Russian prose writer, poet, literary critic of the Soviet period.
Boris Ruchyev (1913-1973) - Russian Soviet poet.

The establishment of the “Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression” was preceded by events that influenced the issuance of the Resolution of the Supreme Council of the RSFSR of October 18, 1991 “On the establishment of a Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression.”

On October 30, 1974, on the initiative of dissidents Kronid Lyubarsky, Alexei Murzhenko and other prisoners of the Mordovian and Perm camps, “Political Prisoner Day” was celebrated for the first time with a joint hunger strike and putting forward a number of demands.
On the same day, Sergei Kovalev held a press conference in A.D. Sakharov’s apartment in Moscow, at which the ongoing action was announced, documents from the camps were shown, statements by Moscow dissidents were made, and the latest 32nd issue of the human rights bulletin “Chronicle of Current Events” was demonstrated "(XTS, an underground publication published in 1968-1982). However, details about the joint action of prisoners came slowly from the camps and in the 33rd issue of XTS on December 10, 1974, the editors admitted that not everyone knew about the events. (A few months later, the organization of this press conference became one of the points of accusation against Kovalev himself).
After this, hunger strikes by political prisoners took place annually on October 30, and since 1987, demonstrations took place in Moscow, Leningrad, Lvov, Tbilisi and other cities. On October 30, 1989, about 3 thousand people with candles in their hands formed a “human chain” around the building of the KGB of the USSR. After they went from there to Pushkin Square to hold a rally, they were dispersed by riot police.
In the late 1980s - early 1990s, when the topic of Stalinist repressions was declassified, the truth became known about the millions killed and tortured during the reign of Joseph Stalin in the USSR.

On October 30, 2009, in his address in connection with the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression, Russian President Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev called not to justify Stalin’s repressions, the victims of which were millions of people]. The head of the Russian state emphasized that the memory of national tragedies is as sacred as the memory of victory.
“It is extremely important,” the president said, that young people (...) be able to empathize emotionally with one of the greatest tragedies in Russian history, the millions of people who died as a result of terror and false accusations during the purges of the 1930s.
And one more thing: “We pay a lot of attention to the fight against falsification of our history. And for some reason we often believe that we are talking only about the inadmissibility of revising the results of the Great Patriotic War. But it is no less important to prevent, under the guise of restoring historical justice, the justification of those who destroyed their people.

In connection with the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression, I advise you to read:
- http://stalin.memo.ru/spiski/
- http://e-libra.su/read/314540-kolimskie-rasskazi.html
- https://shalamov.ru/context/11/

On Prose.ru there is an author Nmkolay Uglov, a writer, the son of a repressed father, a participant in the Great Patriotic War. Nikolay Uglov experienced in his childhood
camp torment and wrote many stories and books about it. Books you can read
To do this, you need to type “Litres Nikolay Uglov” on Yandex.
Nikolai Uglov wrote stories about his childhood in the camps on his page in Prose.ru. I advise you to read two articles by Nikolai Uglov, published in connection with the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression:
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This is a memorable day on which mourning rallies and memorial events are held dedicated to the people who died and suffered during political repression.

Events on this day are officially held in Russia every year on October 30, starting in 1991.

In Moscow, since 2007, the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Terror, on the initiative of the Memorial society, the “Return of Names” campaign has been held: rally participants take turns reading out the names of people executed in 1937-38.

According to the Memorial human rights center, about 800 thousand victims of political repression are currently alive in Russia (according to the Law on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, this number also includes children left without parental care).

On October 30, 1974, on the initiative of Kronid Lyubarsky and other prisoners of the Mordovian and Perm camps, “Political Prisoner Day” was celebrated for the first time by a joint hunger strike and lighting candles in memory of the innocent victims.

After this, hunger strikes by political prisoners took place annually on October 30, and since 1987, demonstrations took place in Moscow, Leningrad, Lvov, Tbilisi and other cities. On October 30, 1989, about 3 thousand people with candles in their hands formed a “human chain” around the building of the KGB of the USSR. After they went from there to Pushkin Square to hold a rally, they were dispersed by riot police.

On October 18, 1991, the Supreme Council of the RSFSR decided to include the Day of Political Prisoner in the list of officially celebrated dates under the name Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression.

In Moscow, mourning events take place annually at the Solovetsky Stone - a granite boulder that was brought from the Solovetsky Islands, where the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp was located, and installed on October 30, 1990 on Lubyanka Square in front of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD-KGB-FSB building.

Text of petitions during funeral services for victims of political repression:

“We also pray for the repose of the souls of the departed servants of God, in the days of hard times those who were innocently killed, who endured suffering and torture, who in exile and imprisonment received a bitter death, whose names You Yourself, Lord, weigh.”

“In the blessed dormition, grant eternal peace, O Lord, to Thy servants who have fallen asleep, who in the days of hard times were killed innocently, who endured suffering and torture, who in exile and imprisonment received a bitter death, whose names You Yourself, Lord, weigh, and create for them eternal memory.”

Protests on the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression

• One of the largest events is the reading of the names of victims of political repression at the Butovo training ground.

The Butovo training ground is a place notorious as a place for mass executions of political prisoners. On the day of remembrance of the victims of political repression, the NKVD execution lists include not only relatives of the innocently killed, but also famous people, artists, scientists, philanthropists and, of course, priests. The Russian Orthodox Church prays for the victims of the “Great Terror” and one of the saddest pages of our history. Among those killed are new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Church.

At the training ground there are usually portraits of people who were shot there. The reading of names can last several hours; in 2013, the event lasted 7 hours.

• Funeral service in the Church of the Resurrection of the Lord.

These days, victims of political repression are remembered at funeral services in churches, one of which is located very close to the Butovo training ground.

From August 1937 to October 1938, more than 20 thousand victims of political repression died at the Butovo training ground.

• Action “Return of names” at Lubyanka.

The names of the victims are read on the day of remembrance of victims of political repression and at Lubyanka. The event usually lasts a full 12 hours. After the reading, people bring candles and flowers to the Solovetsky Stone - a symbol of the “Great Terror”, which claimed the lives of more than 40 thousand of our compatriots.

• Promotions in Katyn.

On October 30, on the day of remembrance of victims of political repression, events are traditionally held at the Katyn memorial complex in the Smolensk region, where the remains of people discovered during the improvement of the Russian part of the memorial were reburied. The complex already contains about a thousand graves of Soviet citizens who died due to paradoxical and unfair accusations or for their political beliefs. In 2017, the museum was reconstructed by the Russian Military Historical Society and the Museum of Contemporary History of Russia. The burial place of victims of political repression is called the “Valley of Death”.