BBC Monitoring October 30, 2006 Russia remembers victims of repression
Today, 30 October, is the day that Russia officially remembers victims of political repression.
Channel One TV news at 1200 gmt presented a round-up that began with President Putin urging ministers to ensure the victims of political repression had sufficient help. Presenter Olga Kokorekina then moved on to other events.
"Meetings to commemorate the victims of political repression are taking place in many cities in Russian. No less than 1,000 people came to the Solovetskiy Stone in Moscow's Lyubyanskaya Ploshchad. After a minute's silence, they laid flowers at the memorial," Kokorekina said. Mourners at the stone, which was brought from the Solovki prison camp that laid the foundation for what ultimately became the gulag system, carried the red carnations traditionally laid at funerals. A picture of recently murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya was prominently displayed.
"The closest estimates put the number of victims of Stalin-era political repression at more than 12m people. The precise number is unknown," Kokorekina continued.
"Many camps in the Far East where innocent convicts were held are still classified but historians are convinced that thousands of political prisoners worked on almost every construction project," she said, leading into a report by Andrey Bernikov from Khabarovsk. His first interviewee, a decorated war veteran "who after the war was won suddenly become an enemy of the people", ended up working on one of these projects, a top secret tunnel under the sea from the mainland to Sakhalin. The video shows part of the tunnel drilled through rock now an open hole onto the sea, the wooden floorboards rotting. Archive footage of the site and men busy digging is also shown.
"The biggest projects of the Stalin era needed human resources on the same scale. More than 30,000 people laboured to build the tunnel, most of them political prisoners," Bernikov continued. "Even today," he said, "the precise number of camps in which political prisoners were held in the Far East is unknown. Not all the archives of the former NKVD have been declassified yet."
Bernikov ended his report at a cemetery in Khabarovsk. He said: "There was no public cemetery here in the 1930s but there was another, a secret cemetery. Instead of this line of trees, there was a deep trench, around 600-m. long. Once a week, late at night, people were brought here from the cellars of the Khabarovsk NKVD directorate. The vehicles that brought them went back empty. It was right here that the death sentence in political cases was carried out."
"Now, 4,302 names of people whose lives ended here in this ditch have been carved on these granite columns. A chapel built by public donations stands on the site of the huge common grave. It is here that former political prisoners, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, come every year on 30 October."
NTVMir also reported from Moscow quoting figures from the Memorial society to say that in 1937 and 1938 nearly one and a half million people were sentenced for counter-revolutionary crimes. More than half were subsequently shot.
The programme also reported from Voronezh Region where 43 people shot in a mass execution of political prisoners in the 1930s were finally laid to rest near the village of Dubrovka. Oaks trees have been specially planted to conceal any traces of the crime. Documents show that at least 10,000 people were executed here, the report said.
Meanwhile, RIA-Novosti news agency said today that Russia's prosecutor's offices have completed their investigations into cases of political repression and more than 775,000 individuals have been rehabilitated.
"Since the Russian Federation law "On the rehabilitation of victims of political repression" came into force (January 1992), agencies of Russia's prosecutor's offices have reviewed in excess of 970,000 criminal cases relating to more than 1,240,000 people accused of particularly dangerous counter-revolutionary crimes. More than 775,000 individuals have been rehabilitated," the agency said.
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