Baltic states and Poland protest Russian removal of Tomsk memorial
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland formally protested the removal of a Soviet-era memorial in Tomsk, Russia on April 22, calling the act "barbaric" and accusing Russian authorities of erasing historical memory.
In a joint letter addressed to Russia's Foreign Ministry, the four embassies located in Moscow said they were "profoundly indignant" by reports that authorities closed the Memorial Park to the Victims of Political Repression on April 19 and dismantled the site's central monument, known as the "Stone of Mourning."
According to the statement, the removed memorial stones commemorated victims of Bolshevik and Stalinist repression, including people of Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Kalmyk origin executed by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in the Tomsk region during the years of Soviet terror.
The countries demanded the restoration of the memorial site, noting that it had been established in accordance with Russian law and with the consent of local authorities.
"We express our resolute opposition to this barbaric act," the statement said.
The embassies described the dismantling of the memorial as an act of hypocrisy, saying their nations had suffered under both Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes. They argued that suppressing the memory of Stalinist repression undermines efforts to preserve the memory of victims of Nazism.
"To prevent the crimes of the past from being repeated, the memory of the victims of both regimes must be preserved," the statement said.
The embassies said they were making the letter public because of significant public interest, concluding with the phrase: "Memory cannot be destroyed."
Tomsk's Memorial Square was opened on October 25, 1992, at the initiative of the city authorities and the local memorial society.
Deportations from Estonia to Siberia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union were carried out by the occupying Soviet regime and happened in two main waves.
The first was in June 1941, followed by another in March 1949, which combined saw tens of thousands of people displaced, on top of the tens of thousands more who had been displaced by fleeing to the west. Several camps in the Gulag system were situated in the vicinity of Tomsk.
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Editor: Argo Ideon
