List of (some of) the Victims of Political Terror in the USSR published in the Internet

The Human rights society “Memorial” has published a list in the Internet of Victims of Political Terror in the USSR which includes almost one and a half million names. Most of the information gathered from different areas of the former USSR is available for the first time on the Internet. “Memorial” adds that the lists will be periodically supplemented as more information becomes available.

The preface to the lists reads:

“In order to honour the memory of the victims of the repression and to help people learn the history of their families, “Memorial” began work in 1998 on creating a single database including information from Memorial Books already published or ready for publication in various areas of the former USSR.

The result of this work was the book “Victims of Political Terror in the USSR” published at the beginning of 2004 where more than one million three hundred thousand names of victims of repression from 62 regions of Russia, from all the regions (oblasti) of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and of two regions (oblasti) of Ukraine – Odessa and Kharkiv, were given. It was this publication that forms the basis of the present Internet list.

Despite the huge changes which have been taking place over recent years in all countries of the former USSR, the problem of keeping the memory of the victims of state terror remains unresolved.

This applies to all aspects – whether the rehabilitation of those condemned with no legal justification, or the publication of documents connected with the repressions, their scale and causes, or finding out where the remains lie of those executed, or creating museums and erecting memorials. The issue of making public lists of the victims of the Terror remains to this day unresolved. Hundreds of thousands of people in different areas of the former Soviet Union (and indeed in many other countries of the world) want to find out about the fate of their relatives. This information is also needed by historians, regional specialists and journalists.

Yet even if the biography of a person is included in one of the Memorial Books of the Victims of the Political Repression, this is very difficult to find out about, since the books are as a rule published with small print runs, and are not normally available for sale.  Even in the main Russian libraries there are no full collections of Martyrologs” [these are the books with lists of the names of the Victims of Repression and date of sentence / execution – translator]

The editorial board of hro.org today received a message which can serve as an example of how important the work of “Memorial” in compiling the Martyrolog is.

The Director of the Inter-regional Human Rights Association “AGORA” Pavel Chikov found his grandfather’s name in the published list.

According to the “Memorial” information Gaisa Bakirov from the village of Verkhnyaya Korsa in the Arsk district of the Tatar Autonomous SSR had at the age of 18 attempted “to disrupt an event held by the Soviet authorities”. For that in December 1929, he was arrested and at the end of January 1930 by a special committee of the OGPU [one of the forerunners to the KGB] of the Tatar Autonomous SSR he was convicted under Article 58-11 of the Soviet Criminal Code and sentenced to three years exile. He was rehabilitated only in 1963 under Nikita Khrushchev.

“I never knew my grandfather - he died soon after I was born”, Pavel Chikov recounts. “And also he never told his own children about his past. Effectively it is only thanks to “Memorial” and the Tatarstan Memorial Book that these facts have become known after 77 years.  A huge thank you and my deepest respect for all your enormous labours.”

The list is to be found at: http://lists.memo.ru/