Officials Remove Memorial to Victims of Soviet Repression in Russia’s Tomsk

The mayor’s office of the Siberian city of Tomsk removed makeshift memorials commemorating victims of Soviet-era repression less than a month after a group of local historians installed them.
In late September, historians in Tomsk erected five wooden posts with the names and photos of 30 people who were executed and buried in the city’s Kashtak ravine in the 1920s and 1940s.
Around 9,000 victims of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s Great Terror are thought to be buried in Kashtak, where local authorities installed a memorial complex in the early 2000s to honor their memory.
But officials demanded that the latest makeshift memorials be removed by Oct. 11 since they had not been authorized with the authorities, according to the local broadcaster TV2.
On Thursday, local media published photos of five holes on the grounds of the memorial complex where the columns used to be, saying they were removed a day earlier.
“Nothing helped, not letters from relatives asking to leave the columns, not requests by ordinary Tomsk residents,” TV2 quoted an anonymous source as saying.
The incident comes after the Moscow Mayor’s Office denied a request to hold a commemoration event honoring the victims of Stalin’s terror for the fifth consecutive year, while authorities blocked the event organizers’ website.
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