A monument to the repressed Poles disappeared from the Levashovsky Memorial Cemetery in St. Petersburg, Sever. Realii” historian and head of the “Returned Names” center Anatoly Razumov.
According to Razumov, the administration of the memorial in Levashovo does not know what happened. The historian wrote a letter to the governor of the city Alexander Beglov and the chairman of the Legislative Assembly Alexander Belsky, in which he demanded to explain who made the decision to dismantle the monument. Razumov has not yet received a response to his appeal.
Razumov believes that the memorial to the repressed Poles could have been taken away for reconstruction, while the authorities and the administration of the Levashovsky cemetery did not officially report such plans.
The Levashovskaya wasteland is a former execution ground of the NKVD, where about 45 thousand victims of the Stalinist repressions of 1937-1953 are buried.
Photo: Anatoly Razumov
Photo: Anatoly Razumov
Monuments to Lithuanians and Poles repressed during the years of Stalinist terror are being demolished and damaged throughout Russia. In April, a stele with a Catholic cross in memory of the deported Poles and Lithuanians was demolished in the Kudymkarsky district of the Perm Territory, and equipment was brought to the Galyashor tract in the Perm Territory and a concrete memorial to the exiles was dismantled.
In June, activists of the Last Address project reported that memorial plaques dedicated to the victims of repression began to disappear from the facades of buildings in Moscow. At the same time, nameplates disappeared from graves in Yakutia, the Sverdlovsk region and Karelia.
«The state is at war with memory.» Who was prevented in Russia by memorials to repressed Lithuanians and Poles