“Returning the names”

On 29 October, on the eve of the official Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression, an action entitled “Returning the names” was held at the Solovky Stone on Lubyanka Square. The event was organized by “Memorial”.

For 12 hours, from 10 in the morning till 10 in the evening, the names of Muscovites executed in 1938 rang out over Lubyanka Square. 389 volunteers read out 3,081 names, this being slightly over a tenth of the entire number of the victims of the Great Terror in Moscow, and a miniscule percentage of the total number of victims of the communist terror.

From 1937-1938 in Moscow alone more than 30 thousand people were executed.

The general list of victims is still far from complete. What has thus far been gathered is available  (in Russian) on the “Memorial” website at: http://lists.memo.ru

The lists contained around 2,700,000 names with biographical notes. This is an updated text version of the database “Victims of the political terror in the USSR”, produced on CD last year.

From an account at www.memorial.ru