Relatives of the victims of Stalin's purges held a ceremony yesterday at an execution site in a Russian forest on the 70th anniversary of the start of the mass killings.
Dozens of family members were joined by a few hundred campaigners, officials and local residents and clerics for the Remembrance Day ceremony by the mass graves of Sandormokh. Memorial, a Russian human rights group, organized the event.
Aug. 5 marks the day in 1937 when top Stalin henchman Nikolai Yezhov issued the notorious Order 00447 for the mass executions of "anti-Soviet and socially dangerous elements."
"We cannot forget that this evil took place. Otherwise, evil will beget evil," said one of the relatives, Liza Derybash, 79, whose mother was executed and buried in one of the mass graves of Sandormokh in November 1937.
Some 7,000 people are believed to lie buried in at least 40 mass graves found at Sandormokh, near the town of Medvezhegorsk, the site of a former prison camp around 1,000km north of Moscow.
"It had to be a remote place so the executions wouldn't be heard ... It was a secret place," said Tatyana Voronina, 30, a researcher at Memorial, which documents the history of the Soviet prison camps.
The site is now strewn with hundreds of crosses extending deep into the dense pine forest. Flowers ring the mass graves, which are marked by depressions in the ground.
Through painstaking historical research, Memorial found the graves in 1997 and has held a yearly ceremony at the site in an effort to keep alive the memory of the millions who perished in the Soviet purges.
In a separate commemorative event in Saint Petersburg, human rights campaigners planned to gather yesterday outside Kresty prison, from which many of the victims of the purges were sent for execution or to the camps.
A memorial cross was also being transported by boat from the Solovetsky Islands in northern Russia, once a prison camp, to a former execution ground outside Moscow, where it was to be consecrated on Wednesday.
Russian media has paid scant attention to the anniversary, and both Memorial campaigners and relatives of the victims complain that there is a reluctance on the part of officials to commemorate the Soviet purges.
"There's a new regime that wants heroes, not victims ... They prefer to celebrate the victory in World War II. It doesn't make you feel proud when you know that it's your own people who did this," Voronina said.
There is also widespread indifference among many Russians, campaigners said.
There have been recent signs, however, of greater efforts by Russian officials to commemorate the history of the Soviet purges, alongside a celebration of brighter chapters of Soviet history.
This included a visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin in June to former Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was imprisoned in the Gulag and wrote extensively about the prison camps, to give him an award.
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
Hungarian authorities temporarily detained seven Ukrainian citizens and seized two armored cars carrying tens of millions of euros in cash across Hungary on suspicion of money laundering, officials said on Friday. The Ukrainians were released on Friday, following their detention on Thursday, but Hungarian officials held onto the cash, prompting Ukraine to accuse Hungary’s Russia-friendly government of illegally seizing the money. “We will not tolerate this state banditism,” Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said. The seven detained Ukrainians were employees of the Ukrainian state-owned Oschadbank, who were traveling in the two armored cars that were carrying the money between Austria and
Kosovar President Vjosa Osmani on Friday after dissolving the Kosovar parliament said a snap election should be held as soon as possible to avoid another prolonged political crisis in the Balkan country at a time of global turmoil. Osmani said it is important for Kosovo to wrap up the upcoming election process and form functional institutions for political stability as the war rages in the Middle East. “Precisely because the geopolitical situation is that complex, it is important to finish this electoral process which is coming up,” she said. “It is very hard now to imagine what will happen next.” Kosovo, which declared
MORE BANS: Australia last year required sites to remove accounts held by under-16s, with a few countries pushing for similar action at an EU level and India considering its own ban Indonesia on Friday said it would ban social media access for children under 16, citing threats from online pornography, cyberbullying, online fraud and Internet addiction. “Accounts belonging to children under 16 on high-risk platforms will start to be deactivated, beginning with YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live and Roblox,” Indonesian Minister of Communications and Digital Meutya Hafid said. “The government is stepping in so that parents no longer have to fight alone against the giants of the algorithm. Implementation will begin on March 28, 2026,” she said. The social media ban would be introduced in stages “until all platforms fulfill their
RSS