Press Release, 30.10.2020

Yabloko Chairman Nikolai Rybakov made a proposal to create a public coalition Sandarmokh, which would continue the work of imprisoned historian Yury Dmitriyev. Rybakov stated this during his visit to the site of Stalin’s mass executions in Sandarmokh, Karelia. A large delegation of Yabloko leaders has specially arrived in Karelia to visit one of the largest burial places of the Great Terror on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Reprisals. The place of mass executions and burials was discovered in Sandarmokh in 1997 by the Karelian historian Yury Dmitriyev. It was for preserving the memory of the victims of Stalin’s reprisals, exposing the names of the executioners and creating a memorial in the place of mass burial, that the authorities staged a fraudulent and dirty criminal case against Yury Dmitriyev and sentenced him this year to 13 years in prison.

Together with Nikolai Rybakov, Deputy Chairman of the party Ivan Bolshakov, deputies of the Legislative Assembly of Karelia from Yabloko Emilia Slabunova and Ivan Gusev, leader of the party faction in the Moscow City Duma Maxim Kruglov, members of the party’s Federal Bureau Grigory Grishin (Saratov) and Kirill Goncharov (Moscow) and others took part in the mourning ceremony.

“We believe that the real reason for the criminal prosecution of Yury Dmitriyev was his work to preserve the memory of those executed in Sandarmokh and publication of the names of the executioners. This means that we need to make every effort so that many more people know about Sandarmokh, more than the number of people who knew about it before Dmitriyev’s arrest,” Nikolai Rybakov said.

The public coalition could be engaged in holding exhibitions, memorial actions, round tables, maing publications, and preparing video programmes dedicated to Sandarmokh, Rybakov noted.

At the same time, the Yabloko Chairman emphasised that the Sandarmokh Coalition should not be just a coalition of memory. “This should be a coalition for the future of Russia without state terror, without Bolshevism, without misanthropy. Because Sandarmokh is not a place of memory. This is a crime scene. And a place of resistance to the revival of the ideas of state terror,” Rybakov said.

According to the Deputy Chairman of the party, Ivan Bolshakov, it is also possible to create an international public coalition together with ethnic communities and national associations. He recalled that representatives of more than 60 nationalities are buried in Sandarmokh, including Finns, Karelians, Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Belarusians, Chechens, Ingushs and Tatars.

“This will be an effective response to those who ordered a criminal case against Yury Dmitriyev. They have been fighting with the wind and will get the storm,” Bolshakov added.