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.
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
DELA ROSA CASE: The whereabouts of the senator, who is wanted by the ICC, was unclear, while President Marcos faces a political test over the senate situation Philippine authorities yesterday were seeking confirmation of reports that a top politician wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) had fled, a day after gunfire rang out at the Philippine Senate where he had taken refuge fearing his arrest. Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the former national police chief and top enforcer of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs,” has been under Senate protection and is wanted for crimes against humanity, the same charges Duterte is accused of. “Several sources confirmed that the senator, Senator Bato, is no longer in the Senate premises, but we are still getting confirmation,” Presidential
RSS