How Moscow speaks on the history of political repressions
OSKOLKI

We have collected various forms of urban material memory about Soviet political repressions and about people subjected to repressions.


This includes monuments, memorial plaques, memorial signs, specialized museums and memorial complexes that have appeared in Moscow since the 1960s, which covertly or explicitly speak of repressions on the city streets.


We wanted to analyze the different ways of talking about Soviet terror in modern Moscow, and we asked the database several questions and tried to visualize the answers received.


Hereinafter, we refer
to the objects as the

sites of memory

Each site of memory has several features that are important for us:

  • year open;
  • (not) mentioning a fact related to the history of repression;
  • initiator
  • dedicated to the memory of one person or group of people;
  • memorial content (social and professional clustering of objects of memory, connection of the site with the state terror, research and educational work);
  • thematic periodization (about what period of repression speaks, implies or is silent);
  • accessibility.
In some cases, we do not know when and / or on whose initiative a particular site was create - we then indicate this in the object card or in a separate group 'unknown' and we would be grateful for any help: [email protected]
annotation board
10
think tank
5
memorial plaque
108
museum
4
monument
43
commemorative sign
30
memorial complex
3
cluster
4

Currently not included in the database:

  • cenotaphs and gravestones in civil cemeteries (except for the sections of the Common Graves of those shot at the Donskoy cemetery),
  • street names,
  • non-core museums, i.e. museums in which the topic of repression is not in focus, but is illuminated side-by-side,
  • memorial plaques to the organizers of the repressions (except for those who later became victims of repression themselves),
  • corpus of objects associated with the royal family.

For this infographic, we limited the geography of memorial sites to the Moscow Ring Road. But we had to make 3 exceptions, they relate to sites of memory that, being outside the Moscow Ring Road, are adjacent to the history of the Moscow terror.


  • two shooting ranges - Butovo and Kommunarka;
  • a monument in the Catherine Wasteland - the former Sukhanov prison;

The map shows that in Moscow there are several hundred objects dedicated to the history of Soviet repressions, but most of them speak about it implicitly, and those that speak openly are often located on the periphery of the urban space - sometimes on the geographic outskirts of the city, and sometimes on the periphery of the center.

Note how the situation has changed since 2014, when the Last Address project appears.


Show Last Addresses on the map

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63
3
64
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69
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85
Era of Stagnation
41
86
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00
Perestroika and the 1990s
64
01
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2000s
79
The return of the names of the repressed to the urban space followed their rehabilitation in political discourse.
The first memorial plaque to someone who was executed appeared in Moscow in 1964 on the wall of the House on the Embankment - it was dedicated to Mikhail Tukhachevsky.
However, even earlier, in 1957 and 1961, memorial were installed to actor Alexei Dikoi and artist Mikhail Nesterov who had been briefly arrested and whose cases were dropped under Stalin. This allowed them to return to an active social and professional life. In 1959 a memorial plaque was installed to surgeon Sergey Yudin who was arrested in 1948 and released on numerous petitions almost immediately after Stalin's death. He returned to work in the Sklifosovsky Institute and died a year later.
There is one more surprising exception: in the 1940s, a memorial plaque to aircraft designer Nikolai Polikarpov was unveiled in Maly Pionersky Lane (now Maly Patriarshy). Although in 1929 Polikarpov was arrested and even sentenced to death, the sentence was changed to imprisonment in a sharashka (OKB-39); after a successful test of the fighter, Polikarpov was amnestied, and after his release he remained to work in his former position. Since the fighters designed by Polikarpov were actively used during the war years, and the designer himself was awarded two Stalin prizes, a memorial plaque was installed almost immediately after his death in 1944.
For several years after Stalin's death, people began to return from the camps and there was a massive posthumous rehabilitation of those shot during the period of the "personality cult". In 1961, Nikita Khrushchev announced the need "to erect a monument in Moscow in order to perpetuate the memory of comrades who became victims of arbitrariness." The monument to the comrades never appeared, but this gave impetus to the appearance of separate memorial plaques.
Following Tukhachevsky, memorial plaques to other victims began to be installed: Postyshev, academician Vavilov, theater director Meyerhold. This was accompanied by the return of their ideas and works to the public space. During these years, there was a public rehabilitation and memorialization of people who before their arrest belonged to the elite of the Soviet state. Of course, not a word was said on the boards about the fate that befell their heroes, but the very return of their names to the public space was in many ways an implicit overcoming of terror and nevertheless the materialization of the memory of the repressed and repressions.
In October 1991 a law on rehabilitation of victims of political repression was adopted. But back in the late 1980s, mass rehabilitation resumed, the Memorial movement arose, and the first monuments openly speaking about the state terror in the USSR began to appear - for example, on October 30, 1990, the Solovetsky stone was erected on Lubyanskaya Square. At the same time, access to many archival documents on political repressions was opened, the identification of historical sites associated with the Soviet terror, and their memorialization began. Memorial complexes appeared at the sites of mass executions, burials of those executed - Donskoy cemetery, Butovo firing range and Kommunarka.
In 2009-2012, the State Concept of Perpetuating the Memory of Victims of Political Repression was developed, and in 2015 was officially approved by the President of the Russian Federation. The concept contributed to the emergence of new state sites of memory, new state practices of memory and often support by state institutions of grassroots initiatives. In some cases, however, the state, relying on the Concept, displaces and appropriates grassroots initiatives and limits the possibilities for a broad discussion of issues of responsibility for the crimes, the nature of the criminal regime, international crimes of the Soviet regime and other sensitive topics.
personal
129
collective
77
'Last Address'
625

Show all

Personal monuments and memorial plaques, both in the Soviet years and later, are set rather for personal achievements in science, art, social activities, etc., and in most cases are silent about the fact of repression. Speaking of repressions, sites of memory are 'collective', put up by a group of victims precisely for the fact of repression.


In 1990-2000, most of the collective memorial sites were anonymous: even the number of victims was not always specified. At mass gravesites, there were frequent cases of individual plaques installed at the own initiative of the relatives of the buried. In recent years, lists of the names of the buried began to appear on the largest memorials at the sites of mass shootings.


At about the same time, the Last Address project appeared, and the Returning the Names event took on its current scale.

culture
27
science
55
army
12
social and political activity
30
sports
6
church
23
victims of political repression
49
state terror system
10
resistance to the system
15

It seems somewhat easier to keep the memory of the victims alive than to comprehend the nature and mechanics of state crimes, and to glorify instances of open resistance to the totalitarian system.

The history of Soviet repression also has its own periodization.


Behind each place of memory there is a story it broadcasts. We tried to look at how different periods of Soviet terror are captured in urban space.


Plase note that our infographic does not yet include many literary, art, historical, and other museums that do not focus on the subject of repression, but cover certain periods in one way or another. We will return to a qualitative study of museum narratives in Moscow.


1917-1922 The first years of the Soviet government
21
1923-1953 (ex. 1937-1938) From the Civil War to the death of Stalin (excluding the Great Terror)
133
1937-1938 Great terror
82
1954-1991 Post-Stalin USSR
15
1917-1991 All years of the existence of the USSR
10
government
87
grassroots
78
church
28
unknown
14

In Soviet times, it was always the state that decided whose name should be returned to the public space: the victims could only be commemorated in stone after their rehabilitation. Many names had no place in the Soviet city: A monument to Mandelstam or a Florensky plaque was out of the question. Therefore, although the original initiators of the installation of memorials at that time might have been relatives, friends, associates or fellow servicemen of the repressed, we still regard these cases as state-sponsored.

With the beginning of perestroika comes the possibility of including private initiative in the realm of the public - individual applicants and public organizations also influence the urban landscape of memory.

The Church is singled out as an initiator of perpetuating the memory of victims of repression. As early as 1989, the Synodal Commission for the Canonization of Saints was founded, and part of its work was the canonization of the clergy and laymen who suffered for the faith - the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia - who were repressed during the Soviet regime. In the early 1990s, the first tangible memorials initiated by the Church also began to appear in Moscow - Poklonnye krossy, and later other memorial objects: plaques, monuments and sites installed – most often – at the places of service of repressed priests.

The database was collected (and continues to be replenished) as part of the many years of work of the Memorial project 'It's right here', and we started creating infographics on the base at the memo.id hackathon at the end of 2018, but we were able to visualize some of the results later.

Credits

Texts, data: Natalia Baryshnikova, Margarita Maslyukova, Alexandra Polivanova

Design: Nadezhda Andrianova

With help and support from: Sergey Bondarkov, Olga Bubnova, Daria Bychenkova, Irina Galkova, Ulyana Ganzhurova, Svetlana Ilyinskaya, Yulia Kravchenko, Olga Lebedeva, Nadezhda Leontieva, Alexander Murin, Albina Nasyrova, Natalia Saltykova, Vasily Starostin, Natalia Stefanovich, Natalia Stepanov Stepanov Samover , Pavel Parkin, Andrey Petropavlov, NadezhdaЭ Popova, Yuri Proskurin, Irina Flige, Daria Khlevnyuk, Anastasia Yakolenko, Alexey Yaskevich.

We thank Dmitry Zimin for his support.

We thank the embassy of Canada in Russia for support.

The Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation entered the International Memorial into the register of NGOs - "foreign agents". We are appealing this decision in court.