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Russia honors memory of political repression victims

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Russia honors memory of political repression victims


30.10.2019

Photo credit: pixabay.com

Memorial Day for Victims of Political Repression is marked in Russia, the Parlamentskaya gazeta newspaper writes. On Wednesday, October 30, we remember millions of people who were unreasonably subjected to repression, sent to forced labour camps, exiled, were deprived of their lives during the years of Stalinist terror and after it.

The memorial date has been established on the occasion of the hunger strike, which was held in 1974 by prisoners of the Mordovian and Perm camps. It is still unknown how many people became victims of political repression. Researchers provide different data - from two to twenty million people.

In the Russian capital, the dead are remembered with a symbolic blow of a flat bells installed at the monument to the Wall of Sorrow. The Memory Bell action is carried out for the second time.

The bell is made of rail delivered from Solovki - the camp, located on the territory of the Solovetsky Islands and the well-known monastery in the 1920s and 1930s, became the first in the extensive system of Soviet correctional institutions in which they served their sentences for political reasons. They hit the bell-rail with a metal beam brought from Kolyma, where the most terrible and massive camps were located.

The action was organized by the Memory Fund and the Gulag History Museum. Anyone who wants to honor the memory of the victims can strike the bell. This year the residents of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Magadan, Krasnodar and other regions of the country will join the action. 

In the evening in Moscow near the Wall of Sorrow there will be a concert of «beals» - flat plates made of bronze and brass, different in composition, size and weight, the sounds of which resemble a bell ringing.

Note that Return of Names campaign began in Moscow earlier. It passes at the Solovetsky stone installed on Lubyanka Square. Its participants take turns reading the names, surnames, age of the profession and the date of the execution of people who died during the Soviet terror of the 1930s and 1950s. People gather at the Solovetsky stone for the thirteenth year in a row.

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