Press Release, 19.05.2015

Today YABLOKO held a series of pickets in memory of Stalin’s deportations of entire peoples. The action was held in front of the Mayor’s office. It was decided to picket the Mayor’s office, after the Moscow government had refused to give YABLOKO a permission to hold a rally in Krasnopresnenskaya Zastava and pickets in Triumfalnaya Square

Committee Against Xenophobia was the organiser of the action. The action was timed to the anniversary of the deportation of Crimean Tatars and other peoples forcibly evicted from their territories by Joseph Stalin.

Activists lined in a chain on both sides of Tverskaya Street with placards depicting which peoples had been deported: 95,000 of Kurds in 1937, 172,000 of Koreans, 438,000 of Germans in 1941, 28,000 of Finns in 1942, 69,000 of Karachai and 95,000 of Kalmyks in 1943, 37,000 Balkarians and 478,000 of Chechens and Ingushes in 1944.

Galina Mikhaleva, Secretary of YABLOKO’s Political Committee, told journalists that prohibition of such memorial actions demonstrated that the Mayor had had hostile attitude to the deported peoples, she called it “creeping re-Stalinization.”

“This is a terrible tragedy, over 6 million people from different ethnic groups peoples were deported, and our authorities did not even apologize to them,” Mikhaleva said.

Galina Mikhaleva also added that about 20 per cent of deported people had died during the deportation, because they had been transported in cattle wagons: “They were Ingushes, Chechens, Kalmyks, Poles, Meskhetian Turks and Germans from the Volga region. All of them were deported within a day and these were mostly children, women and the disabled, including disabled veterans of the war.”

“These peoples must be rehabilitated, and the families should receive compensation. We are pointing out to our government that re-Stalinization is dangerous, ” she concluded.

By the 71st anniversary of the deportation of Crimean Tatars YABLOKO issued a statement running that “prohibition of the actions dedicated to the anniversary of the deportation are another proof that the rights of repressed peoples have not yet been restored.”

YABLOKO leader Sergei Mitrokhin wrote in his blog post on the Ekho MOskvi web-site that “on the eve of the tragic day, Crimean Tatars and other repressed peoples hear a single kind word from the authorities, and moreover faced new reprisals” .

Last year, a mass rally was held on Krasnopresnenskaya Zastava, Moscow. Protesters demanded from the Russian government to establish a common day of memory of the deported peoples.

On Stalin’s orders, the NKVD [later renamed into KGB] troops evicted over 190,000 people, mainly women, elderly, children and disabled veterans [of the Second World War] from their homes, loaded them into wagons for transportation of cattle and sent to the republics of Central Asia under a pretext of “betrayal of Motherland”. About 20 per cent of people died in the first 18 months only since the deportation. Partial rehabilitation of these peoples under Nikita Khrushchev did not give them the right to return to their homeland. And now, 70 years later, the rights of Crimean Tatars have not been fully restored, despite the promises of the authorities.