Final Thoughts

Dictatorships find easy prey in the dead, for they cannot defend themselves.

In October, a memorial to victims of Soviet repression in Vladimir's Prince Vladimir Cemetery was dismantled after state media decried the memorial for commemorating “ardent enemies of our country.”

One of the plaques on the memorial was dedicated to the memory of Archimandrite of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church Klemens Szeptycki, who was persecuted for refusing to cooperate with Soviet authorities. In 1995, the Israeli Yad Vashem Center for Holocaust Studies declared Szeptycki “righteous among the peoples of the world” for saving Jewish people during World War II. In 2001, he was blessed by the Catholic Church.

The memorial also included plaques dedicated to Lithuanian Foreign Minister and Catholic Archbishop Mečislovas Reinys, and Polish politician Jan Jankowski. All died in Vladimir Central prison and were buried in a mass grave.

Shortly before the memorial was dismantled, pro-government media published articles criticizing the memorial. “In the city of Vladimir,” said an SM News article in late August, “you can now see several memorial plaques that are not at all dedicated to residents of Vladimir or even to Russians. These are memorial plaques in honor of the ardent enemies of our country, responsible for the deaths of thousands of our compatriots.”

Vladimir is far from alone.

In July a memorial to repressed Poles disappeared from Levashovsky Cemetery in St. Petersburg – formerly the site of an NKVD execution area, where some 45,000 victims of Stalin’s terror are buried. In September, a monument in the Leningrad region to Finnish soldiers who died in World War II disappeared. Last year, it was reported that signs about repressed and deported Poles in the Tomsk region went missing. Also, nameplates disappeared from the Monument to the Memory of Poles in Yakutsk.

And, this past summer, more than a dozen memorial plaques that had been placed around Moscow as part of the Final Address project (commemorating the final homes of persons repressed in the Soviet era) disappeared. Persons in power said that there had not been proper permission obtained from the homes’ current residents for the plaques.

In the fall of last year, a memorial concrete cross in Rudnik, outside Vorkuta, which has been standing since 1997, was destroyed. A local municipal deputy said that “unknown persons destroyed the concrete base of the memorial and then cut off its mounting hardware.”

The police refused to open a criminal investigation, saying that the huge concrete cross fell “under the influence of weather factors, and without human participation.”

Funds for the monument were donated by the Polish Council for the Preservation of the Memory of Victims of Political Repression, the Polish Council of Prisoners, and the administration and enterprises of Vorkuta.

The monument carried the following inscription: “May mutual understanding and friendship of our peoples grow from the suffering of Poles and Russians in the Gulag camps.”