The first volume of the “Book of Memory” about peasants, who were dispossessed during the years of Soviet collectivization between the end of the 1920s till the early 1930s, was prepared in Krasnoyarsk Territory.
The book will be published in December 2012. It has already been presented by computer on Tuesday, the 30th of October – the national day of commemoration of the victims of political repressions. Human rights activists, staff members of the archives and officers working for the Ministry of the Interior (MVD) participated in the preparation of this book.
„All information had to be gathered from tiniest fragments in the truest sense of the word. In the regional MVD archives we can only find reduced files of those people, who had to suffer from Soviet organs of repression, for registration cards with basic statistical data have already been destroyed in 1959“, - explains the Krasnoyarsk human rights activist and chairman of the regional “Memorial“ Organization Aleksei Babiy.
In total fife-thousand families „got roped“ into the book, whose members were dispossessed; however, Aleksei Babiy assumes that up to fifteen-thousand families and tens of thousands of individuals had to suffer from this process. In the course of time these citizens of the USSR, who, as a general rule, were deportees or people who the chekists had taken everything away from, were to make up entirely different lists yet – execution lists.
Many former kulaks (rich peasants; translator’s note) were killed in 1937-1938 by virtue of decisions made by a so-called „troika“.
We wish to add that human rights activists plan to issue three volumes in all about the dispossessed, but for the moment money is only available to edit one of them.
Press-Line, 30.12.2012