The Moscow government called the memorial plaques of the “Last Address” project with the names of those repressed “not subject to the current legislation.”
This response to the request came to Moscow City Duma deputy Maxim Kruglov from the head of the civil service and personnel department under the Moscow government, Pavel Malykhin.
The official said that the “Last Address” signs do not contain “information about cultural heritage sites, toponyms, the historical, cultural and thematic significance of public objects <…>, do not perpetuate the memory of outstanding events and figures of national history and culture, and They are also not improvement objects that perform the function of informing the population.”
The Moscow government has not received any requests about the installation of signs or their disappearance from the “Last Address,” Malykhin writes to the deputy. At the same time, the official emphasizes that the placement of signs is not at all provided for in the state policy “to perpetuate the memory of victims of political repression.”
This concept, Malykhin explained, only includes “the formation and development of memorial sites in places of mass graves of victims of political repression that perpetuate their memory.”
Malykhin told Kruglov that in Moscow there are already “works of monumental and decorative art dedicated to the victims of political repression”: the sign “Eternal Memory of the Victims of Political Repression” in Kuzminki, the Solovetsky Stone on Lubyanka and the “Wall of Sorrow” on Sakharov Avenue.
“Monuments dedicated to the victims of political repression are also installed on the territory of Moscow cemeteries,” concluded Malykhin. According to him, the Moscow government has been carrying out “many years of systematic work to perpetuate the memory of victims of political repression” and for more than 50 years has installed at least “20 highly artistic memorial plaques dedicated to repressed citizens.”
Project activists and Memorial volunteers reported that “Last Address” memorial plaques began to disappear from the facades of buildings in Moscow last summer. The signs are also being removed in St. Petersburg. One of the coordinators of the “Last Address” project, Sergei Parkhomenko, previously suggested that signs with the names of victims of repression are removed by “all sorts of scoundrels” or utility workers, and there are no “orders or centralized orders” to remove them.
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