Caucasian Knot ( Russian : Кавказский узел , romanized : Kavkazkii Uzel ) is an online news site that covers the Caucasus region in English and Russian. It was established in 2001 and Grigory Shvedov is the editor-in-chief. It has a particular focus on politics and on human rights issues, including freedom of the press .
112-567: In 2001 the site started out as a project related to the human rights organisation Memorial , but developed into a site for independent journalism. In 2003 the Caucasian Knot launched its English-language site. It is funded by a number of charitable organisations in the U.S. and Western Europe. The site had a monthly readership of approximately 1.8 million in 2011. Caucasian Knot does not have any editorial offices, citing security risks. Grigory Shvedov operated from Moscow while many of
224-456: A ban on party factions and banned those party members who had opposed him, effectively ending democratic centralism . In the new form of Party organization, the Politburo, and Stalin in particular, were the sole dispensers of ideology. This required the elimination of all Marxists with different views, especially those among the prestigious "old guard" of revolutionaries. As the purges began,
336-536: A double team of interrogators. Bukharin's confession in particular became subject of much debate among Western observers, inspiring Koestler's acclaimed novel Darkness at Noon and philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror . His confessions were somewhat different from others in that while he pleaded guilty to "sum total of crimes", he denied knowledge when it came to specific crimes. Some astute observers noted that he would allow only what
448-513: A fabricated confession by the interrogators. After the interrogations the files were submitted to NKVD troikas, which pronounced the verdicts in the absence of the accused. During a half-day-long session a troika went through several hundred cases, delivering either a death sentence or a sentence to the Gulag labor camps. Death sentences were immediately enforceable. The executions were carried out at night, either in prisons or in secluded areas run by
560-589: A joint expedition of the St. Petersburg and Karelian Memorial Societies led by Dmitriev, Irina Flige, and Veniamin Joffe found 236 common graves containing the bodies of at least 6,000 victims of Stalin–era purges , executed in 1937 and 1938. In 2016, the Russian government attempted to revise this account, claiming that among the dead were Soviet POWs shot by invading Finns in 1941–1944. Memorial representatives challenged both
672-567: A key source of trustworthy information about human rights in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. The launch of the online version was held at Memorial's office in Karetny. Many former editors of the underground publication attended, including Sergei Kovalev and Alexander Lavut . Memorial has funded or helped to produce various publications and films related to human rights. This included the documentary The Crying Sun (2007), which focused on
784-402: A network of party members supposedly working against Stalin, including several of Stalin's rivals. Many of those arrested after Kirov's murder, high-ranking party officials among them, also confessed plans to kill Stalin himself. The validity of these confessions is debated by historians, but there is consensus that Kirov's death was the flashpoint at which Stalin decided to take action and begin
896-544: A number of the Soviet Union's diaspora nationalities: the Finnish , Latvian , Estonian , Bulgarian , Afghan , Iranian , Greek , and Chinese . Of the operations against national minorities, it was the largest one, second only to the "Kulak Operation" in terms of the number of victims. According to Timothy Snyder , ethnic Poles constituted the largest group of victims in the Great Terror, comprising less than 0.5% of
1008-585: A petition to the 19th All-Union Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1988, and that body supported Politburo proposals for the creation of a monument to the victims of political repression during the cult of personality under Stalin . A similar decision by the 22nd Congress of the CPSU in 1961 had been ignored for many years. A significant juncture in Memorial's development
1120-540: A project together with the BBC named "North Caucasus through the eyes of bloggers". The Caucasian Knot journalist Bella Ksalova was shot in the city of Cherkessk on July 25, 2010 by Arsen Abaikhanov. Akhmednabi Akhmednabiev, who was deputy editor of the weekly paper Novoe Delo and also wrote for Caucasian Knot, was shot and killed in Makhachkala in 2013. On April 16, 2016 Caucasian Knot correspondent Zhalaudi Geriyev
1232-768: A study of the "national" operations conducted by the NKVD during the Great Terror , 1937–1938. Examining the available documents, they noted that the FSB, successor to the NKVD and KGB , had not fulfilled the terms of a June 1992 edict issued by President Boris Yeltsin . This demanded that all legislative acts and other documentation that "served as the basis for mass repressive measures and violations of human rights" should be declassified and made publicly available within three months. The Great Terror involved "crimes against humanity" and
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#17328025098971344-707: Is an international human rights organisation , founded in Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union to study and examine the human rights violations and other crimes committed under Joseph Stalin 's reign. Subsequently, it expanded the scope of its research to cover the entire Soviet period. Memorial is the recipient of numerous awards, among others the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 . Prior to its dissolution in Russia in early 2022, it consisted of two separate legal entities, Memorial International , whose purpose
1456-406: Is based. In October 2022, Memorial was one of the three laureates of that year's Nobel Peace Prize , alongside Ukrainian human rights organisation Centre for Civil Liberties and Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski , for their efforts in "document[ing] war crimes, human rights abuses, and the abuse of power". Memorial's creation was a response to growing public awareness of historic abuses within
1568-768: Is given out jointly by the German charity ZEIT-Stiftung and the Norwegian free speech organisation Fritt Ord . In 2009, Caucasian Knot was awarded with the Prize of the Union of Journalists of Russia for defending the interests of the professional community. The editor received the Dutch Geuzenpenning award in 2012 for his work with Memorial and Caucasian Knot. Memorial (society) Memorial (Russian: Мемориал , IPA: [mʲɪmərʲɪˈaɫ] )
1680-702: The Goethe Medal for her work relating to Memorial's activities. In 2009, Memorial HRC was awarded the Victor Gollancz Prize by the Society for Threatened Peoples . In 2012, Memorial was awarded the Custodian of National Memory prize by the Institute of National Remembrance . On 4 February 2015, Lech Wałęsa nominated Memorial International for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. Memorial
1792-654: The Great Terror and the Gulag and their families. Between 1987 and 1990, while the USSR was still in existence, 23 branches of the society were established. When the Soviet Union collapsed, branches of Memorial in Ukraine remained affiliated to the Russian network. Some of the oldest branches of Memorial in northwest and central Russia, the Urals and Siberia later developed websites documenting independent local research and published
1904-622: The Helsinki Groups of the late Soviet period, said Roginsky, and he named the Chronicle of Current Events (1968–1982) and its compilers as a model to be emulated. Memorial was founded on 26–28 January 1989 as a "historical and educational" society at a conference held in the Moscow Aviation Institute. Two years later a distinct Memorial Civil Rights Defense Center was also set up. In a random poll conducted on
2016-661: The Supreme Court of Russia ordered Memorial International to close for violations of the foreign agent law. A lawyer for Memorial said it would appeal. The Memorial Human Rights Centre was ordered shut by the Moscow City Court on 29 December 2021; state prosecutors accused it of breaching the foreign agent law and supporting terrorism and extremism. On the same day, the European Court of Human Rights applied an interim measure instructing Russia to halt
2128-777: The Trial of the Twenty-One , is the most famous of the Soviet show trials, because of persons involved and the scope of charges which tied together all loose threads from earlier trials. Meant to be the culmination of previous trials, it included 21 defendants alleged to belong to the "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites", supposedly led by Nikolai Bukharin, the former chairman of the Communist International , former premier Alexei Rykov , Christian Rakovsky , Nikolai Krestinsky , and Genrikh Yagoda , recently disgraced head of
2240-504: The Tsarist regime , former members of political parties other than the communist party, etc.). They were to be executed or sent to Gulag prison camps extrajudicially, under the decisions of NKVD troikas. The following categories appear to have been on index-cards, catalogues of suspects assembled over the years by the NKVD and were systematically tracked down: "ex-kulaks" previously deported to " special settlements " in inhospitable parts of
2352-655: The Year of '37 ( 37-й год , Tridtsat' sed'moy god ) and the Yezhovshchina ( Ежовщина [(j)ɪˈʐofɕːɪnə] , lit. ' period of Yezhov ' ), was a political purge in the Soviet Union that took place from 1936 to 1938. It sought to consolidate Joseph Stalin 's power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and aimed at removing the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky within
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#17328025098972464-578: The dissolution of the Soviet Union , Memorial was reconstituted as an International NGO , a "historical, educational, human rights and charitable society", with organizations in several post-Soviet states (Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan , Latvia , and Georgia ), as well as in Germany, the Czech Republic , Italy, and France. According to its post-Soviet 1992 charter , Memorial pursued the following aims: Its online database contains details of
2576-594: The general line of the party , often by direct orders of the politburo headed by Stalin. Hundreds of thousands of people were accused of various political crimes (espionage, wrecking , sabotage , anti-Soviet agitation , conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups). They were executed by shooting or sent to the Gulag labor camps . The NKVD targeted certain ethnic minorities such as the Volga Germans , and Soviet citizens of Polish origin, who were subjected to forced deportation and extreme repression. Throughout
2688-649: The "commission" authorized by the Politburo and gave assurances that death sentences would not be carried out. After the trial, Stalin not only broke his promise to spare the defendants, he had most of their relatives arrested and shot. In May 1937, the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials , commonly known as the Dewey Commission, was set up in
2800-417: The "social disorder" caused by the upheavals of forced collectivization of peasants and the resulting famine of 1932–1933 , as well as the massive and uncontrolled migration of millions of peasants into cities. The threat of war heightened Stalin's and generally Soviet perception of marginal and politically suspect populations as the potential source of an uprising in case of invasion. Stalin began to plan for
2912-410: The 2008 seizure in St. Petersburg of much of the materials on which the project was based (see § Persecution for further information), and faced with a need to update the information (and the technology), it was decided to create a map of the burial grounds, graveyards and commemorative sites across Russia. Launched in Russian in 2016, an English-language version, "Russia's Necropolis of Terror and
3024-598: The 411 burial grounds and commemorative sites included on the "Russia's Necropolis" website. Memorial worked on the law "On Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression". Throughout its existence, but particularly since 2012, the International Memorial Society has widened its range of activities. Today these include the Last Address project and, following the example of Berlin and its Topography of Terror excursions and exhibitions,
3136-634: The Bolsheviks as a systematic method of instilling fear and facilitating control over the population in a campaign called the Red Terror . As the Russian Civil War drew to a close, this campaign was relaxed although the secret police did remain active. From 1924 to 1928, the mass repression – including incarceration in the Gulag system – dropped significantly. By 1929, Stalin had defeated his political opponents and gained full control over
3248-523: The Communist Party chided him as undemocratic and lax on bureaucratic corruption. This opposition to current leadership may have accumulated substantial support among the working class by attacking the privileges and luxuries the state offered to its high-paid elite. The Ryutin affair seemed to vindicate Stalin's suspicions. Ryutin was working with the even larger secret Opposition Bloc in which Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev participated, and which later led to both of their deaths. Stalin enforced
3360-701: The Gulag" followed in August 2021. This resource documents over 400 sites, some dating back to the Russian Civil War , noting their state of preservation, monuments and ceremonies, and whether they have protected status. It includes the killing fields of the Great Purge such as Krasny Bor , the abandoned burial grounds of the Gulag, and also 138 graveyards of the "special" settlements to which "dekulakized" peasant families and then Poles, Lithuanians and others were deported in their tens of thousands. At
3472-583: The Kovalevsky Woods near St. Petersburg, Memorial attempted to construct a National Memorial Museum Complex to commemorate the 4,500 victims who were killed and buried there during the Red Terror . Memorial workers discovered the bodies in 2002. A memorial complex already exists at the Sandarmokh killing field (1937–1938) in Karelia, thanks to the efforts of Yury A. Dmitriev . In July 1997,
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3584-406: The Moscow Trials to be frame-ups." In the second trial, Karl Radek testified that there was a "third organization separate from the cadres which had passed through [Trotsky's] school," as well as "semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth-Trotskyites, people who helped us, not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us, people who from liberalism, from a Fronde against
3696-428: The NKVD was the largest of this kind. The Polish operation claimed the largest number of the NKVD victims: 143,810 arrests and 111,091 executions according to records. Snyder estimates that at least eighty-five thousand of them were ethnic Poles. The remainder were 'suspected' of being Polish, without further inquiry. Poles comprised 12.5% of those who were killed during the Great Terror, while comprising only 0.4% of
3808-447: The NKVD and located as a rule on the outskirts of major cities. The "Kulak Operation" was the largest single campaign of repression in 1937–38, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed, more than half the total of known executions. A series of mass operations of the NKVD was carried out from 1937 through 1938 targeting specific nationalities within the Soviet Union, on the order of Nikolai Yezhov . The Polish Operation of
3920-464: The NKVD on the orders of Stalin. Following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, a power vacuum opened in the Communist Party, the ruling party in the Soviet Union (USSR). Various established figures in Lenin's government attempted to succeed him. By 1928, Joseph Stalin, the party's General Secretary, had triumphed over his opponents and gained control of the party. Initially, Stalin's leadership
4032-514: The NKVD under chief Genrikh Yagoda began the removal of the central party leadership, Old Bolsheviks , government officials, and regional party bosses . Soviet politicians who opposed or criticized Stalin were removed from office and imprisoned or executed by the NKVD. Eventually, the purges were expanded to the Red Army and military high command, which had a disastrous effect on the military. The campaigns also affected many other categories of
4144-400: The NKVD. Although an Opposition Bloc led by Trotsky and with zinovievites really existed, Pierre Broué asserts that Bukharin was not involved. Differently from Broué, one of his former allies, Jules Humbert-Droz , said in his memoirs that Bukharin told him that he formed a secret bloc with Zinoviev and Kamenev in order to remove Stalin from leadership. The fact that Yagoda was one of
4256-785: The Order of the Politburo of the Bolshevic Communist Party from 5 March 1940 Onwards (Moscow 2015), with 4 415 biograms of the victims. Gurianov Aleksandr, ed. Those Killed in Kalinin, buried in Mednoye. The Memorial Book of Polish Prisoners of War - Prisoners of the Ostashkov Soviet NKVD Camp, Shot Dead at the Order of the Politburo of the Bolshevic Communist Party from 5 March 1940 Onwards (Moscow 2019) Both titles were launched on 17 September, to
4368-564: The Party, gave us this help." By the "third organization," he meant the last remaining former opposition group called the Rightists , led by Bukharin, whom he implicated by saying: I feel guilty of one thing more: even after admitting my guilt and exposing the organisation, I stubbornly refused to give evidence about Bukharin. I knew that Bukharin's situation was just as hopeless as my own, because our guilt, if not juridically, then in essence,
4480-484: The Russian Federation after its invasion of Ukraine , including the closure of Memorial) made this impossible as of 2024. In the early 21st century, Memorial in St. Petersburg worked to create the "Virtual Gulag" Museum in order to bring together research and archives from all over the former Soviet Union and to commemorate and record the existence of the Gulag and the lives of its inmates. Disrupted by
4592-528: The Russian Federation". Oleg Orlov , a board member of Memorial, commented that the prize represents "much-needed moral support at a difficult time for rights activists in Russia". A cash reward, which comes with the prize, of € 50,000 was awarded to Memorial in December 2009. The writer and historian Irina Scherbakowa , a founder and staff member of Memorial, was given the Ossietzky Award and
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4704-808: The Russian Federation, as well as refugees from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In 2008, Memorial won the Hermann Kesten Prize . In 2009, Memorial won the Sakharov Prize of the European Union, in memory of murdered Memorial activist Natalya Estemirova . Announcing the award, President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek said that the assembly hoped "to contribute to ending the circle of fear and violence surrounding human rights defenders in
4816-399: The Soviet Union (USSR) during the 1980s, as well as concern about contemporary human rights, especially in certain hotspots around the USSR. This took place within the context of perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness), policies pursued by president Mikhail Gorbachev which led to increased government transparency and tolerance of civil society. An earlier statement of
4928-405: The Soviet Union and restore capitalism. These trials were highly publicized and extensively covered by the outside world, which was mesmerized by the spectacle of Lenin's closest associates confessing to most outrageous crimes and begging for death sentences: It is now known that the confessions were given only after great psychological pressure and torture had been applied to the defendants. From
5040-466: The Soviet Union. The term great purge was popularized by the historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror , whose title was an allusion to the French Revolution 's Reign of Terror . The purges were largely conducted by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), which functioned as the interior ministry and secret police of the USSR. Starting in 1936,
5152-530: The Soviet government. The food shortage led to a mass famine across the USSR and slowed the Five Year Plan. A distinctive feature of the Great Purge was that, for the first time, members of the ruling party were included on a massive scale as victims of the repression. In addition to ordinary citizens, prominent members of the Communist Party were also targets for the purges. The purge of the Party
5264-425: The Soviet period. Another project is the "Open List" database, created in several languages of the former Soviet Union (Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian and Belarusian) to encourage relatives and descendants of those shot, imprisoned and deported to contribute information about the victims and their families. This expanded sources of information beyond the case files kept on individuals by the Soviet security services or
5376-651: The USSR. Quoting the RLA jury: "for showing, under very difficult conditions, and with great personal courage, that history must be recorded and understood, and human rights respected everywhere if sustainable solutions to the legacy of the past are to be achieved." In the same year, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) named Memorial HRC as the winner of the annual Nansen Refugee Award for its wide range of services on behalf of forced migrants and internally displaced people in
5488-719: The United States by supporters of Trotsky, to establish the truth about the trials. The commission was headed by the noted American philosopher and educator John Dewey . Although the hearings were obviously conducted with a view to proving Trotsky's innocence, they brought to light evidence which established that some of the specific charges made at the trials could not be true. For example, Georgy Pyatakov testified that he had flown to Oslo in December 1935 to "receive terrorist instructions" from Trotsky. The Dewey Commission established that no such flight had taken place. Another defendant, Ivan Smirnov , confessed to taking part in
5600-410: The accounts of former OGPU officer Alexander Orlov and others, the methods used to extract the confessions are known: such tortures as repeated beatings, simulated drownings, making prisoners stand or go without sleep for days on end, and threats to arrest and execute the prisoners' families. For example, Kamenev's teenage son was arrested and charged with terrorism. After months of such interrogation,
5712-540: The accused is not essential. The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence" in a trial that was based solely on confessions. He finished his last plea with the words: [T]he monstrousness of my crime is immeasurable especially in the new stage of struggle of the U.S.S.R. May this trial be the last severe lesson, and may the great might of the U.S.S.R. become clear to all. Romain Rolland and others wrote to Stalin seeking clemency for Bukharin, but all
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#17328025098975824-471: The accused showed the speed at which the purges were consuming their own. It was now alleged that Bukharin and others sought to assassinate Lenin and Stalin from 1918, murder Maxim Gorky by poison, partition the USSR and hand its territories to Germany, Japan, and Great Britain, and other charges. Even previously sympathetic observers who had accepted the earlier trials found it more difficult to accept these new allegations as they became ever more absurd, and
5936-487: The assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, at a time when he had already been in prison for a year. The Dewey Commission later published its findings in a 422-page book titled Not Guilty . Its conclusions asserted the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow Trials. In its summary, the commission wrote Independent of extrinsic evidence, the Commission finds: The commission concluded: "We therefore find
6048-552: The awards ceremony. The jury has been headed in the past by Otto Sigurd, Svetlana Aleksiyevich and Ludmila Ulitskaya . To date, 26 collections of winning entries have been published: the majority of these can be found on the "Lessons of History" website. Memorial had a special Polish programme headed by Aleksandr Gurianov . Together with the Polish KARTA Center , the Memorial Polish programme researched
6160-524: The basis of denunciations or because they were related to, were friends with or knew people already arrested. Engineers, peasants, railwaymen, and other types of workers were arrested during the "Kulak Operation" based on the fact that they worked for or near important strategic sites and factories where work accidents had occurred due to "frantic rhythms and plans". During this period the NKVD reopened these cases and relabeled them as "sabotage" or "wrecking." The Orthodox clergy , including active parishioners,
6272-574: The choice was not made against Putin, who launched an invasion of Ukraine in February of that year. Memorial also received the 2022 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Democracy Defender Award, jointly with Ukrainian Human Rights Centre ZMINA, for courageous and important efforts to promote human rights and democracy. In April 2021, Memorial researchers Sergei Krivenko and Sergei Prudovsky published
6384-614: The country ( Siberia , the Urals , Kazakhstan, and the Far North ), former tsarist civil servants, former officers of the White Army , participants in peasant rebellions, members of the clergy, persons deprived of voting rights, former members of non-Bolshevik parties, ordinary criminals, like thieves, known to the police and various other "socially harmful elements". However, a large number of people were arrested at random in sweeps, on
6496-419: The crime and the exhumations, and a roll-call of the respective victims with biogram and picture, where available. They are based on analogous Polish publications, but include additional information on the Katyn Massacre and expanded biograms. The four publications are: Gurianov Aleksandr, ed. Those Killed in Katyn. The Memorial Book of Polish Prisoners of War - Prisoners of the Kozelsk NKVD Camp, Shot Dead at
6608-414: The crimes of the Soviet secret police . Some of these goals became feasible in the late 1980s when several activists such as Lev Ponomaryov , Yuri Samodurov , Vyacheslav Igrunov , Dmitry Leonov, and Arseny Roginsky proposed a complex to commemorate the victims of Stalinism . Their concept included a monument, a museum, an archive, and a library. An "all-Union informal movement" organized and submitted
6720-463: The crimes of the Soviet regime in their region. After the Russian foreign agent law was passed in July 2012, Memorial came under increasing government pressure. On 21 July 2014, the Memorial Human Rights Centre was declared a "foreign agent" by the Ministry of Justice . The label was extended in November 2015 to the Research & Information Centre at St. Petersburg Memorial, and on 4 October 2016 to Memorial International itself. On 28 December 2021,
6832-413: The date on the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland : the book on Katyn in 2015, on the 75th anniversary; and the three volumes on Mednoye on the 80th anniversary, in 2019. Memorial was planning to continue the project and publish a volume on the Katyn Massacre committed at the Kharkov Regional Directorate of the NKVD, however the events after 2019 (the COVID-19 pandemic and the policy pursued by
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#17328025098976944-430: The death toll for the Great Purge (1936–1938) to be roughly 700,000-1.2 million. Despite the end of the Great Purge, the widespread surveillance and atmosphere of mistrust continued for decades. Similar purges took place in Mongolia and Xinjiang . While the Soviet government desired to put Trotsky on trial during the purge, his exile prevented this. Trotsky survived the purge, though he would be assassinated in 1940 by
7056-407: The defendants were driven to despair and exhaustion. Zinoviev and Kamenev demanded, as a condition for "confessing", a direct guarantee from the Politburo that their lives and that of their families and followers would be spared. This offer was accepted, but when they were taken to the alleged Politburo meeting, only Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov , and Yezhov were present. Stalin claimed that they were
7168-472: The estimated number of "kulaks" and "criminals" in their districts. These individuals were to be arrested and executed, or sent to the gulag camps. The party chiefs complied and produced these lists within days, with figures which roughly corresponded to the individuals who were already under secret police surveillance. On 30 July 1937, the NKVD Order No. 00447 was issued, directed against "ex-kulaks" and other "anti-Soviet elements" (such as former officials of
7280-442: The fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received 292 votes against. After Kirov's assassination, the NKVD charged the ever-growing group of former oppositionists with Kirov's murder as well as a growing list of other offenses, including treason, terrorism, sabotage, and espionage. Another justification for the purge was to remove any possible "fifth column" in case of a war. Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich , participants in
7392-412: The first three into fervent anti-communists eventually. To them, Bukharin's confession symbolized the depredations of communism, which not only destroyed its sons but also conscripted them in self-destruction and individual abnegation. On the first day of trial, Krestinsky caused a sensation when he repudiated his written confession and pleaded not guilty to all the charges. However, he changed his plea
7504-412: The focus of affiliated groups differs from region to region, they share similar concerns about human rights, documenting the past, educating young people and marking remembrance days for the victims of political repression . Memorial emerged during the perestroika years of the late 1980s, to document the crimes against humanity committed in the USSR during the 20th century and help surviving victims of
7616-482: The forced dissolution of Memorial, pending the outcome of litigation. On 29 December 2021, HRC Memorial as a legal entity in Russia was closed and liquidated by the Moscow City Court as violating the "Foreign Agent" Law. On 5 April 2022, the Russian Court of Appeal confirmed the dissolution. Some of Memorial's human rights activities continued in Russia. Memorial continues to operate in other countries, notably in Germany where its oldest and largest non-Russian chapter
7728-400: The goals later pursued by the Memorial Society was made by Brezhnev era dissidents in February 1974, following the deportation of dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the USSR. They called for publication in the USSR of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago , the opening of all secret police archives relating to the past, and the organization of an international tribunal to examine
7840-410: The government (through the NKVD) shot Bolshevik heroes, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Béla Kun , as well as the majority of Lenin's Politburo, for disagreements in policy. The NKVD attacked the supporters, friends, and family of these "heretical" Marxists, whether they lived in Russia or not. The NKVD nearly annihilated Trotsky's family before killing him in Mexico; the NKVD agent Ramón Mercader
7952-516: The late Soviet period have remained affiliated with the Russian network. A noted centre for work both on historical materials and current human rights concerns is the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group , an affiliate organisation since February 1989, which today runs the "Human Rights in Ukraine" portal. In 2004, the Memorial Human Rights Centre (HRC) was among the four recipients of the Right Livelihood Award , for its work in documenting violations of human rights in Russia and other former states in
8064-618: The late stages of the Purge rather than deliberate discrimination in sentencing). The wives and children of those arrested and executed were dealt with by the NKVD Order No. 00486 . The women were sentenced to forced labour for 5 or 10 years. Their minor children were put in orphanages. All possessions were confiscated. Extended families were purposely left with nothing to live on, which usually sealed their fate as well, affecting up to 200,000–250,000 people of Polish background depending on
8176-472: The leading defendants were executed except Rakovsky and two others (who were killed in NKVD prisoner massacres in 1941). Despite the promise to spare his family, Bukharin's wife, Anna Larina , was sent to a labor camp, but she survived to see her husband posthumously rehabilitated a half-century later by the Soviet state under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988. On 2 July 1937, in a top secret order to regional Party and NKVD chiefs Stalin instructed them to produce
8288-697: The mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and soldiers, policemen, officials, intelligentsia and others conducted at Stalin's order by the NKVD in Katyn , Kalinin , Kharkiv , Kyiv and probably near Minsk in April and May 1940. The result of this research are four publications on the murders, all edited by Gurianov: one volume on Katyn, where NKVD officers murdered at least 4,400 regular army officers and reserve officers; and three volumes on Kalinin, were 6,300 policemen and prison guards and border guards were shot dead. Both titles contain an introduction on
8400-527: The motivation behind this claim and the purported new evidence intended to support it. In 2008, Memorial HRC launched an online version of the noted samizdat publication A Chronicle of Current Events , which had been distributed in the Soviet Union. Appearing at irregular intervals during the year, it was circulated in typescript form ( samizdat ) in the USSR from 1968 to 1983. All of its 63 issues were also translated into English and published abroad. Western observers and scholars considered it to be
8512-660: The next day after "special measures", which dislocated his left shoulder among other things. Anastas Mikoyan and Vyacheslav Molotov later claimed that Bukharin was never tortured, but it is now known that his interrogators were given the order "beating permitted", and were under great pressure to extract confession out of the "star" defendant. Bukharin initially held out for three months, but threats to his young wife and infant son, combined with "methods of physical influence" wore him down. But when he read his confession amended and corrected personally by Stalin, he withdrew his whole confession. The examination started all over again, with
8624-473: The one hand, to hotspots around the Soviet Union and Russia, the two wars in Chechnya, conflicts with neighbouring countries, especially Georgia and Ukraine , and, on the other hand, to the regime within Russia under Vladimir Putin and his administration. Great Purge The Great Purge , or the Great Terror ( Russian : Большой террор , romanized : Bol'shoy terror ), also known as
8736-596: The organization in Russia. Over time it has become an independent human rights organization based in Germany. Memorial Italia has been operating since 2004. Memorial Belgium was founded in 2007. Later, branches of the International Memorial were also set up in the Czech Republic (2016) and most recently a French branch came into existence in April 2020. In eastern and southern Ukraine, as noted earlier (§), Memorial organisations set up during
8848-588: The other reporters (approximately fifty) are spread around in the Caucasus area, including in Chechnya , Dagestan , and Azerbaijan . The reporters stay in contact via Google programs in a virtual office. Due to safety concerns, a number of the correspondents do not use their names. Russian human rights activist and journalist Natalya Estemirova contributed to Caucasian Knot before she was kidnapped and killed in Chechnya in 2009. In 2009, Caucasian Knot launched
8960-473: The party. He organized a committee to begin the process of industrialization of the Soviet Union. Backlash against industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture escalated, which prompted Stalin to increase police presence in rural areas. Soviet authorities increased repression against the kulaks (i.e., wealthy peasants that owned farmland) in a policy called dekulakization . The kulaks responded by destroying crop yields and other acts of sabotage against
9072-576: The passport regime", etc. were also dealt with in a summary way. In Moscow, for example, nearly one third of the 20,765 persons executed on the Butovo firing range were charged with a non-political criminal offence. To carry out the mass arrests, the 25,000 officers of the State Security personnel of NKVD were complemented with units of ordinary police, and Komsomol ( Young Communist League ) and civilian Communist Party members. Seeking to fulfill
9184-415: The police. Memorial's archives have been used by historians such as Briton Orlando Figes . Since 1999, Memorial has organised an annual competition for secondary school students around the theme of "The Individual and History: Russia in the 20th century". It received between 1,500 and 2,000 entries each year. Authors of the 40 best contributions are invited to Moscow to attend a special school academy and
9296-476: The population. Overall, national minorities targeted in these campaigns composed 36% of the victims of the Great Purge, despite being only 1.6% of the Soviet Union's population. 74% of ethnic minorities arrested during the Great Purge were executed while those sentenced during the Kulak Operation had only a 50% chance of being executed, (though this may have been due to the Gulag camp's lack of space in
9408-483: The preventive elimination of such potential recruits for a mythical "fifth column of wreckers, terrorists and spies." The term " purge " in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the expression purge of the Party ranks . In 1933, for example, the Party expelled some 400,000 people. But from 1936 until 1953, the term changed its meaning, because being expelled from the Party came to mean almost certain arrest, imprisonment, and often execution. The political purge
9520-567: The purge expanded to include almost every living Old Bolshevik leader except Stalin and Kalinin . No other crime of the Stalin years so captivated Western intellectuals as the trial and execution of Bukharin, who was a Marxist theorist of international standing. For some prominent communists such as Bertram Wolfe , Jay Lovestone , Arthur Koestler , and Heinrich Brandler , the Bukharin trial marked their final break with communism, and even turned
9632-427: The purge, the NKVD sought to strengthen control over civilians through fear, and frequently used imprisonment, torture, violent interrogation, and executions during its mass operations . In 1938, Stalin reversed his stance on the purges, criticized the NKVD for carrying out mass executions, and oversaw the execution of Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov , who headed the NKVD during the purge years. Scholars estimate
9744-401: The purges. Some later historians came to believe that Stalin arranged the murder, or at least that there was sufficient evidence to reach such a conclusion. Kirov was a staunch Stalin loyalist, but Stalin may have viewed him as a potential rival because of his emerging popularity among the moderates. The 1934 Party Congress elected Kirov to the central committee with only three votes against,
9856-419: The quotas, the police rounded up people in markets and train stations, with the purpose of arresting "social outcasts". Local units of the NKVD, in order to meet their "casework minimums" and force confessions out of arrestees worked long uninterrupted shifts during which they interrogated, tortured and beat the prisoners. In many cases those arrested were forced to sign blank pages which were later filled in with
9968-433: The radicals. The conference was addressed by dissidents Larisa Bogoraz and Elena Bonner (wife of dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov ), and by the octogenarian writer Oleg Volkov , an early inmate of the Gulag 's Solovki camp . In a report to the Politburo, KGB head Kryuchkov singled out Arseny Roginsky , future chairman (1998–2017) of International Memorial, as particularly outspoken. Memorial should become an heir to
10080-505: The repression as members of the Politburo, maintained this justification throughout the purge; they each signed many death lists. Stalin believed war was imminent, threatened both by an explicitly hostile Germany and an expansionist Japan. The Soviet press portrayed the country as threatened from within by fascist spies. From the October Revolution onward, Lenin had used repression against perceived and legitimate enemies of
10192-685: The scope of the project should not be restricted to the Stalin era because repressive measures had begun with the October Revolution under Vladimir Lenin . On 6 July 1989, Memorial organized its first public event by picketing the Chinese Embassy in Moscow in protest over the Tiananmen Square Massacre . Memorial was not formally recognized until 1990 when the organization acquired official status. On 19 April 1992, after
10304-446: The size of their families. National operations of the NKVD were conducted on a quota system using album procedure . The officials were mandated to arrest and execute a specific number of so-called "counter-revolutionaries", compiled by administration using various statistics but also telephone books with names sounding non-Russian. The Polish Operation of the NKVD served as a model for a series of similar NKVD secret decrees targeting
10416-405: The society has organised similar educational ventures about the Soviet era in Moscow and other Russian cities. In 2005, Memorial's database contained records of more than 1,300,000 victims of political repression in the Soviet Union. First issued as a CD, by 2020 the fifth edition of the database was available online and held over three million entries of those shot, imprisoned or deported during
10528-447: The society: intelligentsia , wealthy peasants —especially those lending out money or wealth ( kulaks )—and professionals. As the scope of the purge widened, the omnipresent suspicion of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries began affecting civilian life. The purge reached its peak between September 1936 and August 1938 under the leadership of Nikolai Yezhov , hence the name Yezhovshchina . The campaigns were carried out according to
10640-554: The streets of Moscow, respondents named many whom they thought suitable candidates for the Memorial Society's board of trustees. The second most popular was Andrei Sakharov , who had won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 for his efforts to promote civil liberties within the Soviet Union; Sakharov became the first Memorial chairman. The exiled Solzhenitsyn was also named but he declined the invitation, saying he could do little to help from abroad; in private, he told Sakharov that
10752-567: The two-day event. Secretaries of several creative unions (architects, designers, artists and filmmakers) were present as potential trustees of the proposed organization. More radical voices were also heard, including those of the Moscow Popular Front, the newly founded Democratic Union , and uncensored periodicals such as Glasnost and Express Chronicle . Members of the Moscow Action Group of Memorial were among
10864-415: The victims of political repression in the USSR ; the fifth version contains over three million names, although Memorial estimated that 75% of victims had not yet been identified and recorded. Memorial organized assistance, both legal and financial, for the victims of the Gulag. It conducts research into the history of political repression and shares the findings in books, articles, exhibitions, museums, and
10976-459: The village of Zumsoy in Chechnya , and the struggle of its citizens to preserve their cultural identity in the face of military raids and enforced disappearances by the Russian army and 'guerilla' fighters. The 25-minute film was produced in collaboration with WITNESS . International Memorial has branches in several European countries. Memorial Germany was founded in 1993 in Berlin to support
11088-478: The websites of its member organizations. Moscow Memorial was among the organisations that persuaded the Russian authorities to follow the long-standing dissident tradition of marking 30 October each year, transforming it into an official Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions . Over the next thirty years this date was adopted across Russia: by 2016 annual events were held on 30 October at 103 of
11200-433: Was accompanied by the purge of the whole society. Soviet historians organize the Great Purge into three corresponding trials. The following events are used for the demarcation of the period: Between 1936 and 1938, three very large Moscow trials of former senior Communist Party leaders were held, in which they were accused of conspiring with fascist and capitalist powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember
11312-586: Was an academic and a founding member of Memorial, while Prudovsky began by researching the fate of his grandfather and has spent the last ten years on a wide-ranging study of political repression in the 1930s. The growing list of prisoners of conscience and political prisoners in Russia (the Memorial Human Rights Centre issued a list of 377 names on 9 November 2021) reflected the link always drawn by Memorial between past atrocities and present-day violations of human rights. This referred, on
11424-544: Was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize along with Belarusian human rights activist Ales Bialiatski and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Centre for Civil Liberties . Berit Reiss-Andersen , the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee , stated that the recipients "have made an outstanding effort to document war crimes, human rights abuses and the abuse of power", however the committee stated that
11536-435: Was in written confession and refuse to go any further. The result was a curious mix of fulsome confessions (of being a "degenerate fascist" working for "restoration of capitalism") and subtle criticisms of the trial. One observer noted that after disproving several charges against him, Bukharin "proceeded to demolish or rather showed he could very easily demolish the whole case." He continued by saying that "the confession of
11648-492: Was its Moscow conference on 29–30 October 1988. After the failure of officialdom to force the postponement of the conference, it gathered 338 delegates from 57 cities and towns. In a report to the Politburo dated 16 November the new KGB head, Vladimir Kryuchkov , observed that 66% of the delegates came from Moscow and the Moscow Region. Kryuchkov decried "provocative statements" made by dissidents and young activists during
11760-482: Was kidnapped by unknown security forces. He was accused of working against the authorities in Chechnya and was sentenced to three years prison for illegal transport and possession of large quantities of drugs. To support the journalist, international human rights organizations made statements to recognize him as a political prisoner. In 2007, Caucasian Knot was awarded the Free Press of Eastern Europe award , which
11872-414: Was nearly annihilated: 85% of the 35,000 members of the clergy were arrested. Particularly vulnerable to repression were also the so-called "special settlers" ( spetzpereselentsy ) who were under permanent police surveillance and constituted a huge pool of potential "enemies" to draw on. At least 100,000 of them were arrested in the course of the Great Terror. Common criminals such as thieves, "violators of
11984-457: Was part of an assassination task force put together by Special Agent Pavel Sudoplatov , under the personal orders of Stalin. By 1934, several of Stalin's rivals, such as Trotsky, began calling for Stalin's removal and attempted to break his control over the party. In this atmosphere of doubt and suspicion, the popular high-ranking official Sergei Kirov was assassinated . The assassination, in December 1934, led to an investigation that revealed
12096-486: Was primarily an effort by Stalin to eliminate challenge from past and potential opposition groups, including the left and right wings led by Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin , respectively. Following the Civil War and reconstruction of the Soviet economy in the late 1920s, veteran Bolsheviks no longer thought necessary the "temporary" wartime dictatorship, which had passed from Lenin to Stalin. Stalin's opponents inside
12208-640: Was the recording of the crimes against humanity committed in the Soviet Union, particularly during the Stalinist era , and the Memorial Human Rights Centre , which focused on the protection of human rights , especially in conflict zones in and around modern Russia. A movement rather than a unitary system, as of December 2021 Memorial encompassed over 50 organizations in Russia and 11 in other countries, including Kazakhstan , Ukraine , Germany , Italy , Belgium and France . Although
12320-524: Was the same. But we are close friends, and intellectual friendship is stronger than other friendships. I knew that Bukharin was in the same state of upheaval as myself. That is why I did not want to deliver him bound hand and foot to the People's Commissariat of Home Affairs. Just as in relation to our other cadres, I wanted Bukharin himself to lay down his arms. The third and final trial, in March 1938, known as
12432-556: Was therefore subject to no statute of limitation. In 1968, the USSR acceded to the UN Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity . Decades later, and thirty years after the 1992 presidential edict, the researchers were filing cases in the courts to pressure regional branches of the FSB to release documents about the Great Terror over 80 years earlier. Krivenko
12544-422: Was widely accepted; his main political adversary, Trotsky, was forced into exile in 1929, and Stalin's doctrine of " socialism in one country " became enshrined party policy. However, in the early 1930s, party officials began to lose faith in his leadership, largely due to the human cost of the first five-year plan and the collectivization of agriculture . From 1930 onwards, the Party and police officials feared
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