By Andrew Osborn
MOSCOW, April 23 (Reuters) – Four European states accused Russia on Thursday of trying to destroy the memory of Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s crimes against his own people after a monument to Russians and other people executed by his secret police was dismantled in Siberia.
Residents of the city of Tomsk woke up on Sunday to discover that a memorial complex to victims of Stalin’s secret police, including a so-called “Stone of Grief” and a memorial arch, had been dismantled overnight.
The mayor’s office initially posted a statement saying it had acted after an unnamed resident warned that a nearby garage built on a slope could collapse. It later deleted the explanation and has since declined to comment.
The Tomsk memorial complex was built on the site of a suspected mass grave of people shot dead by the NKVD secret police whose former prison building, now a museum, overlooks the area.
The complex was dedicated to people killed at various periods in Soviet history, including Stalin’s 1937-38 “Great Terror”, in which nearly 700,000 people were executed, according to conservative official estimates.
“We express a strong protest against this barbaric act and demand the restoration in Tomsk of this place of memory,” said a statement from the embassies of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia addressed to the Russian Foreign Ministry.
It said memorial stones to their own citizens murdered during the “Great Terror” had also been taken away.
“It is necessary to preserve the memory of the victims so that the crimes of the past are not repeated. It’s not possible to destroy memory!” the embassies said.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately comment on the statement.
Moscow has complained about what it has called the immoral destruction of monuments to the Soviet army in Poland and in the three Baltic countries which it says were liberated from Nazi Germany in World War Two by the Red Army at enormous cost.
The four countries – all of which are helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia – saw the Red Army as occupiers rather than liberators.
SUPREME COURT RULING
The removal of the Tomsk memorial complex follows a ruling by Russia’s Supreme Court this month to designate human rights group Memorial, founded in the late 1980s to document political repression in the Soviet Union, as an “extremist” movement.
It said Memorial was “anti-Russian in nature” and engaged in “eroding historical, cultural, spiritual, and moral values,” assertions rejected by Memorial, whose work inside Russia is now banned.
The removal also follows a request by Andrei Lugovoi, a prominent nationalist lawmaker, for the authorities to “check” the legality of the Solovetsky Stone in central Moscow – one of Russia’s main monuments to Stalin’s victims.
Lugovoi said it had become a rallying point for Western ambassadors to visit annually in a gesture which he said seeks to divide Russians and buttress what he casts as false criticism of Russia’s current authorities.
Moscow’s main museum dedicated to the Gulag – the network of prison and forced labour camps which existed in Soviet times – is being repurposed into a museum focused on Nazi Germany’s crimes against Soviet citizens during World War Two.
President Vladimir Putin this week also signed a decree renaming the academy of the FSB security service, the main successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, after Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police and an architect of the so-called Red Terror.
(Editing by Timothy Heritage)
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