Russian historian gives back Stalin’s victims their identity
Saint Petersburg: He has shone a light on the lives and deaths of tens of thousands of Joseph Stalin’s victims, but Russian historian Anatoly Razumov says his work is greeted with “indifference” in a country that still struggles to acknowledge the enormity of the bloody purges.
For the past three decades, Razumov has worked through archives to make public the names of those executed during Stalin’s purges in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, which targeted suspected “counter- revolutionaries” or so- called “enemies of the people” in the late 1930s.
“I haven’t discovered any logic to it. It was inhumane and inexplicable,” the historian told AFP of his findings, which he regrets now prompt little reaction.
Commemorating the victims remains a vexed question in Russia, more than 80 years after the height of the Great Terror, which saw millions executed and sent to Gulag prison camps or into exile in remote regions.
Under Vladimir President Putin, authorities have downplayed these darkest pages of Soviet history in the name of national unity and are sometimes even overtly hostile to such research.
Since the late 1980s, Razumov has compiled 13 volumes of what he calls a “Leningrad Martyrology,” using an ancient term for books listing Christian martyrs, with the dates of birth, arrest and death of the victims.
They also list the names, jobs and addresses of the people who lived in Leningrad before they were disappeared.
At best, relatives would have been told their loved ones had been “convicted without the right to written correspondence,” without ever learning what had actually happened to them. “I launched my research in 1987 in the era of Perestroika reforms, as soon as it became possible,” Razumov said.
A Soviet army officer’s son, Razumov doesn’t come from a family that was touched by repressions. But he chose to take on this mission to pay final respects to the men and women executed in the purges, from all walks of life including engineers, workers, tailors and shop assistants.
Razumov’s study is lined with hundreds of files he has collected, often from the archives of the Stalinera secret police, the NKVD, but also sent to him by relatives of victims.
Razumov, 62, admits his work has not received much support from the state, saying he senses “indifference” to the Stalin purges among the officials.
The Russian leadership rarely mentions the Terror and Putin doesn’t attend annual commemorative events held by Memorial.