Memorial plaques dedicated to the victims of Stalin's repressions have disappeared from the wall of the cemetery in Vladimir. The first to draw attention to this in mid-October was Greek Catholic priest Ilya Astapov.
The cleric noted that one of the tablets was dedicated to the memory of Klimenty Sheptytsky, an archimandrite of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church who was repressed for refusing to cooperate with the Soviet government. In 1995, the Israeli Holocaust research center Yad Vashem declared Sheptytsky a “Righteous Among the Nations” for saving more than a hundred Jews during World War II, and in 2001 he was beatified by the Catholic Church.
The Dovod publication writes that other missing memorial signs were dedicated to the Lithuanian Catholic Archbishop Mecislovas Reinis, the Polish politician Jan Jankowski, and the Japanese general Akikuse Shun. All three died in the Vladimir Central prison and were buried at the Prince Vladimir cemetery in a mass grave. It is unknown who exactly initiated the removal of the signs.
The Argument post notes that shortly before the dismantling, pro-government Vladimir publications criticized the memorial. In particular, in August, the authors of the SM-news website called the victims of repression “ardent enemies of our country, responsible for the deaths of thousands of our fellow citizens.”
The SM-news article says that Reinis “fought Soviet Russia for decades” and “supported the Lithuanian Nazis who fought in the same ranks with the Nazis.” Yankovsky, according to the authors of the text, organized terrorist attacks and sabotage on the communications of the Red Army, and Sheptytsky “actively supported gangs of Ukrainian fascists and the Bandera underground.”
“Today, when in the Vladimir region, as throughout Russia, the victims of the Ukrainian Nazis are buried, the memorial to the nationalist, schismatic and Nazi collaborator Sheptytsky in Vladimir looks, at the very least, very strange and illogical,” summarizes the author of the SM-news article.
Monuments and memorial signs dedicated to repressed foreigners have been regularly disappearing in Russia lately. In the summer, a monument to repressed Poles disappeared from the Levashovsky Memorial Cemetery in St. Petersburg. In the spring, in different areas of the Perm Territory, the Catholic cross was demolished and the concrete memorial to the Poles and Lithuanians exiled to these places was dismantled. In September, it became known that in Priozersk, Leningrad Region, a monument to Finnish soldiers who died during World War II had disappeared from the pedestal of the Lutheran Church.
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