Thirty-four plaques from the Last Address Foundation dedicated to those repressed in the Soviet years were removed from the House of Specialists on Lesnoy Prospekt in St. Petersburg, a Kommersant correspondent reported.
The project website says that the signs on the facade of this house began to be installed in 2016. The first was dedicated to the director of the Sevkabel plant, Yefim Kovarsky. In 1937, he was accused of «espionage, undermining state property and participating in a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization» and shot.
Also on the building were plaques in memory of the repressed employees of the Krasnaya Zarya telephone plant who lived in the House of Specialists, including the head of the mechanization bureau of the plant, Friedrich Schneider, the head of the technical department, Vladimir Dmitriev, and the head of production, Ivan Sivachenko, who were shot in 1937.
According to Sota, residents of the building at 61 Lesnoy Prospekt told Yevgeniya Kulakova, curator of the Last Address project, that the management company had removed the signs from the building. At the same time, the fund did not officially comment on this information.
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.
Also, in Russia, they began to demolish and damage monuments to Lithuanians and Poles repressed during the Stalinist terror: one of them was removed from the Levashovskaya wasteland in Petersburg. In the Kudymkarsky district of the Perm Territory, a stele with a Catholic cross in memory of the deported Poles and Lithuanians was demolished, and in the Galyashor tract in the Perm Territory, equipment was brought in and a concrete memorial to the exiles was dismantled.
«The state is at war with memory.» Who was prevented in Russia by memorials to repressed Lithuanians and Poles