Russian ultranationalists disrupt service honouring victims of Stalinism

A number of pro-government activists attempted to disrupt a memorial service being held to commemorate the victims of Stalin’s Great Terror in Karelia, northwestern Russia, on Tuesday, participants in the event told Novaya Gazeta Europe.

The service took place in Sandarmokh, where at least 6,000 people were secretly shot and buried by the NKVD, the Stalinist secret police, from 1937 to 1938. Since the discovery of mass graves at the site in 1997, some 300 memorial plaques have been placed to honour the dead, and an annual memorial event is held on 5 August in which the names of the victims are read aloud by activists.

One of the activists told Novaya Europe that the incident could no longer be called exceptional as the ceremony is now disrupted “almost every year”. Last year, a group of far-right activists installed powerful speakers in the trees to play loud patriotic music as they chanted “Jews sponsored Hitler”.

Kirill Goncharov, the deputy chairman of the Moscow Yabloko party, said on his Telegram channel that some of the disruptors wore the insignia of the Russian ultranationalist vigilante group Russkaya Obshchina.

“In spite of such petty offences, it is important to come back again and again. Especially in these dark times,” Goncharov wrote.

The Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions is observed in Russia and much of the former Soviet Union every 5 August to honour the memory of those who died or were imprisoned by the Soviet government between 1917 and 1991.