The Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repressions was established as a mournful date in 1991, shortly before the demise of the Soviet Union as a single state.
October 30 was the day when they commemorate all those who ended their days in the logging of Kolyma, in the execution cellars of the NKVD, GPU, Cheka, MGB and other punitive institutions that served the communist regime.
Why 1937?
Part of the truth about what happened to those convicted under Article 58, Soviet citizens learned in 1956, after reading the materials of the XX Congress. The First Secretary of the CPSU N. S. Khrushchev was not there, he believed in the inevitability of the victory of communism. A bold attempt was made to instill in the working people the idea of the accidental nature of millions of tragedies.
Several episodes of feature films were dedicated to the memory of the victims of political repressions, which, as a rule,ended more or less happily, and the number "1937" was firmly entrenched in the mind as a symbol of lawlessness and arbitrariness. Why did you choose this particular year? After all, the number of those arrested and shot in previous and subsequent periods was no less, and sometimes even more.
The reason is simple. In 1937, the leadership of the CPSU (b) took up the purge of the ranks of their own party. The role of "enemies of the people" was tried on by those who quite recently themselves were engaged in determining the degree of loy alty of a particular citizen, deciding his future fate. Such a life collapse is remembered for a long time.
Victims or executioners?
Establishing the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repressions, many deputies of the Supreme Council, adhering to communist beliefs, again tried to convince the general public, and sometimes even themselves, that socialism with some special, “human” face is possible. As examples, "bright images" of such communist-Leninists as Tukhachevsky, Uborevich, Blucher, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Rykov or Kamenev were cited. The calculation was simple, despite the universal secondary education and the availability of education in universities, the citizens of the country of the Soviets treated the works of the classics of Marxism-Leninism formally, according to the principle "memorized, passed, forgot."
It was assumed that on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions, the people would commemorate the executed members of the Leninist Politburo, the executioners of Kronstadt and Tambov, theorists of the proletariandictatorship and other representatives of the Bolshevik elite, rehabilitated in the late fifties or in the Gorbachev years.
Memory of the color of the people
The truth, however, is the irrefutable fact that the purge of the ranks of the CPSU (b) was a completely logical continuation of the general line of the party for the full suppression of any dissent. Beginning in 1917, a targeted extermination of the color of Russian society was carried out. Mass executions of peasants, clergymen, professors, engineers, military men, representatives of creative professions for twenty years were considered a historically natural process, they took place to the applause and joyful hooting of Bukharin, Radek, Zinoviev and similar "faithful Leninists" until they themselves did not fall under the Stalinist ax.
On the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions, one can remember those who opposed totalitarianism in the post-Stalin years, and there were many of them. The beginning of the sixties was marked by several large-scale popular uprisings that broke out in Novocherkassk (1962), Krasnodar (1961), Odessa (1960) and other cities. Executions of demonstrations, secret trials of the "organizers", death sentences were the result.
The Solovetsky Stone on Lubyanka has become a place where former prisoners, their descendants and everyone who remembers the truth or wants to know it, lay flowers on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Repression. Unfortunately, there are fewer of them.
