Historians point to hushing up repression topic

The work to establish the names of the repressed people and rehabilitate the victims in the Volgograd Region cannot be treated as complete, but in the conditions of the deliberate silencing the repressions by local authorities, there are no resources to continue the work.

Activists of the Volgograd Regional Association of Victims of Political Repressions have restored the names of 250,000 repressed fellow countrymen; the rehabilitation process was over only by 2016.

The data that 250,000 Stalingrad residents were repressed, of whom about 200,000 were then rehabilitated, is far from being complete, Andrei Kudinov, a historian, has pointed out. According to his story, there is no state interest in searching for victims of political repressions and voicing out the scale of the tragedy.

Mr Kudinov explained that many documents about the repressed people, stored in archives, for example, at the police, were liquidated.

He has named some well-known public figures of the region who were repressed. Thus, in 1935-1936, almost the entire staff of the Stalingrad Society of Local History was arrested. For the incorrect submission of museum material, I. Izyumsky, the director of the local history museum and his employees were shot dead.

The topic of Stalin's repressions has been receiving less and less attention in recent years amid the increased political persecution, Andrei Suslov, an expert in the history of Stalinism and political repressions in the USSR, has stated.

He has explained that people are beginning to "establish a bridge between the repressions of the 20th century and persecutions of dissidents today."