Press Release, 29.10.2015

YABLOKO leaders and activists participated in the annual memorial action commemorating the victims of political reprisals during Stalin’s period. The action was organised on the threshold of October 30, the Day of Political Prisoners, established in 1974 by Soviet political prisoners who conducted hunger strikes and lit candles in memory of the victims on that day. The action took place near the FSB (former KGB) building at Lubyanka square by the Solovetsky stone which had been brought from the Solovetsky Islands, the location of the Solovki prison camp which was part of the Soviet Gulag system.

The participants of the action received lists with the names of the Muscovites – victims of Stalin’s terror of 1937 – 1938, their age, posts and dates of execution – read the names out loud and put candles to the Solovetsky Stone. The action began at 10.00 and finished at 10.00 pm.

30,000 people were shot in Moscow in 1937-1938.

After the action YABLOKO activits conducted picketing near the house where Stalin’s victims were shot demanding from the authorities to save the house and open a memorial museum there.

YABLOKO member Alexei Nesterenko has been picketing the house where Stalin’s victims were shot every Wednesday since April 2011. His father was shot in that house, therefore it is important for Nesterenko to turn the place into a memorial museum.

The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union was situated in that house in the years of Great Terror. “The enemies of the people” were adjudged at the place, among them: writers Isaak Babel, Boris Pilnyak, film director Vsevolod Meyerhold, marshals Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Alexander Yegorov, members of Political Bureau Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinovyev, Lev Kamenyev and the others.