Imprisoned Russian politicians -- including Kremlin critics Aleksei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza -- along with other activists are holding a one-day hunger strike on October 30 to honor political prisoners as residents of towns and cities in several Russian regions marked the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression.
The hunger strike was initiated earlier in October by Navalny, Kara-Murza, and others including Lilia Chanysheva, Daniel Kholodny, Vadim Ostanin, and Mikhail Kriger, all of whom have been recognized as political prisoners by Russian human rights groups.
Under Stalin, millions of Soviet citizens were killed, tortured, imprisoned, or exiled by the Soviet state. Nostalgia for Stalin and for the Soviet Union has flourished under President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who has praised the dictator as an “effective manager.”
October 30 was chosen to honor gulag inmates in the Russian regions of Mordovia and Perm who started a mass hunger strike on that day in 1974, protesting political persecution in the Soviet Union.
"In this situation, we think it is right for us to turn to our roots and traditions," the group of activists said when announcing the hunger strike.
Navalny's website said on October 30 that a book based on the answers of Russian political prisoners to questions by noted Russian writer Boris Akunin (Grigori Chkhartishvili), who currently resides in London, was issued to mark the day.
"The inaction of good people is enough for evil's triumph.... The hypocrisy of neutrality, indifference to politics, withdrawing to cover up laziness, cowardness, and turpitude are major reasons why a small group of well-organized wrongdoers have mistreated millions in the course of humankind's history," Navalny told Akunin, adding that "in the current dramatic times, I love Russia not less than always, as I know how to differentiate the government from the people."
In the Far Eastern city of Magadan, local residents gathered near the Mask of Sorrow monument close to the city and held an action called Not To Be Forgotten. The participants read aloud the names, ages, occupations, dates of trials or executions of their relatives during the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's Great Terror campaign in the 1930s-1950s.
The Mask of Sorrow monument designed by late Russian-American sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, whose parents were victims of the Stalinist repressions in the 1930s, is located on the Krutaya hill near Magadan, where the gulag's major transit prison was once located.
In the city of Birobidzhan, local authorities and residents laid flowers at a monument honoring Soviet repression victims. It is believed that about 6,000 residents of the surrounding Jewish Autonomous Region were persecuted during Stalin's purge.
Meanwhile, in the capital of the Siberian region of Buryatia, Ulan-Ude, a makeshift memorial appeared near a monument commemorating victims of Soviet-era repression to honor 59 victims from the Ukrainian village of Hroza who were killed by a Russian missile strike on October 5. The makeshift memorial consisted of flowers and posters, saying " Village of Hroza," and "Stop Putin -- Stop the War."
Authorities in two major Siberian cities, Novosibirsk and Tomsk, canceled events without explanation but dozens of local residents in the two cities laid flowers to monuments commemorating victims of Soviet repression.
Police in Yoshkar-Ola, the capital of Russia's Mari El region in the Volga Federal District, detained local resident Kirill Voitovich, who came to the event to honor victims of Soviet-era repression on October 30 with a poster in Belarusian saying "The Night of Poets or Black Night, October 29-30. Eternal memory of the Bolshevik terror's victims. Live on forever."
Voitovich was marking October 29-30, 1937, when the Soviet security service, the NKVD, executed at least 132 Belarusian and Jewish intellectuals. The mass executions are known as the Night of Poets or Black Night.
A day earlier, hundreds of people in Moscow honored the memory of thousands of men and women executed by the Soviet authorities. The event held near the former KGB headquarters in the Russian capital was attended by foreign diplomats.
Similar events were held in several other towns and cities across Russia on October 29.
