In Moscow, police officers blocked Lubyanka Square and the passages to the Solovetsky Stone, according to a broadcast from the Memorial society, which on October 29, on the eve of the Day of Victims of Political Repression, is holding the “Return of Names” campaign.
Dozens of people came to lay flowers at the Solovetsky Stone in the morning, including the co-chairman of Memorial Oleg Orlov and the chairman of the board of the society Jan Rachinsky, as well as embassy staff — diplomats from Austria, Belgium, Great Britain, the USA, Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, France and other countries. The policeman, as reported by a Sota correspondent, said that he would let three or four people through the fences at a time.
“Today we are on Lubyanka Square near the Solovetsky Stone. When we arrived here, most of the exits were already fenced off, there were a lot of police, two paddy wagons and two police cars. People were not allowed to go inside, they were forbidden to film, and they were told that three people would be allowed in with a search,” said the presenter of the Memorial broadcast.
When asked why such measures were needed, one of the police officers replied: “To maintain public order.”
“For the first time, perhaps, when we came to the Solovetsky Stone, we saw that the square was cordoned off. Today this is the attitude towards the memory of the victims of repression. Not to gather for more than three — it looks like a mockery of the memory of the victims,” Yan Rachinsky said on air.
The Moscow City Hall previously refused to allow Memorial to hold the “Return of Names” campaign due to coronavirus restrictions. The Moscow Department of Regional Security responded on September 29 that “taking into account the emerging epidemiological situation <…> There is a ban on holding public events in Moscow.”
On the same day, a patriotic rally and concert dedicated to the anniversary of the annexation of Ukrainian territories was held on Red Square.
International Memorial has been holding the “Return of Names” campaign for 13 years — from 10 am to 10 pm on October 29, people come to the monuments to the victims of Soviet repression and read the names of those executed into the microphone. In 2022, Moscow authorities also banned the event due to coronavirus.
“Last year, the reading at the Solovetsky Stone was also not approved, but we still held the “Return of Names”: we filmed the readings, went live, left flowers and candles in different places of the city associated with memory about Soviet terror. How Covid works, according to the Moscow authorities, is no secret to anyone,” Memorial wrote about the ban on the event.
The Supreme Court of Russia liquidated International Memorial in 2021. According to the Prosecutor General's Office, the organization “created a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state.”