We remember the victims and perpetrators of Stalinist terror, one day at a time. #OTD by @aksinia00447 and @tupacisoverit
Tbilisi, GEO & Fort Worth, USA
Joined July 2022
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1/2 "[...] the so-called organs of the NKVD are in the main a degenerate organization of unprincipled, dissolute, well-kept functionaries who, enjoying the former authority of the Cheka, seeking to satisfy the pathological suspiciousness of Stalin (I fear to say more), pursuing
ALT "Long live the workers of the NKVD - faithful sons of our great homeland! Long live the Stalin commissar Nikolai Ivanovich Ezhov." Soviet poster from 1937
October 31, 1938. #OTD Wife and husband Lilly Oskarovna Shuster-Morozova and Sergey Alexandrovich Morozov were executed together and interred at Levashovskaya Pustosh, or what is now known as the Levashovo Memorial Cemetery, in the Leningrad region.
Lilly was a German national, and citizen of that country until 1934, but born and raised in Yelnya, Smolensk region. She was a housewife and mother and had no known political affiliation. She was sentenced on Article 58-10/11 charges (anti-Soviet agitation and counterrevolutionary activity). She was 32 when she was executed by firing squad.
Sergey was a mechanic at the Badaev warehouse in Leningrad. He too was born and raised in Yelnya, Smolensk region. I think they may have been childhood sweethearts. He was 33 when he was executed, also by firing squad.
Sergey’s charges (Article 58-10/11) were identical to Lilly’s, and additionally the couple was not just executed on the same day but arrested on the same day, June 19, 1938.
They were survived by their daughter, Rene Sergeevna Morozova, who was 9 years old when her parents were killed.
We don’t know about their rehabilitation status.
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October 31, 1939. #OTD a foundational writer of Yakut literature and an architect of the modern Yakut nation, Platon Alekseevich Sleptsov (pseud. Oyunsky), after his arrest for accusations of preparing an armed uprising, died of Tuberculosis in a prison in his homeland at age 45.
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October 31, 1938. #OTD Ida Osipovna Rappoport, a Jewish national born in Riga, and educated in Germany, who worked as an engineer at a factory in the Mari ASSR, was executed at age 34.
Rappoport spent a year in NKVD custody before she was shot on Article 58-6 (espionage) charges. When she was arrested she had a one-year-old daughter, who went on to have her own daughter. This woman, Rappoport’s granddaughter, spent many years trying to acquire any information about her grandmother, because her family did not have living memories of her.
Rappoport was rehabilitated by the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Mari ASSR on May 13, 1968.
October 30, 1937. #OTD Vladimir Sergeevich Trubetskoy, and his daughter, Varvara Vladimirovna Trubetskaya, were executed. They were aged 47 and 22.
The pictures in order are Vladimir, his daughter Varvara, his wife Elizaveta, and his daughter Alexandra.
Vladimir came from Russian nobility and served in the Cuirassier Regiment until the revolution, at which point he was conscripted into the Red Army. His passions were hunting and writing and his book, Notes of a Cuirassier, was finally published in the 1990s.
After his military service, Vladimir earned his living playing the cello in taverns and movie theaters. He must have been a bit of a rogue because he was arrested seven times in the 20s and early 30s until the authorities finally exiled him to Andijan, Uzbekistan. Unfortunately we don’t know the specific charges. His family went with him.
When the terror came he was rearrested and condemned to death. He was rehabilitated in 1964.
His daughter, Varvara, was a theater student. As with her father, we don’t know the specific charges against her but she was executed in Andijan on the same day as Vladimir. She was also rehabilitated in 1964.
Vladimir’s wife, Elizaveta Vladimirovna Trubetskaya, was arrested in 1942 and died in 1943 of typhus while imprisoned at Butyrka. We don’t know the charge. She was 55.
Finally, Vladimir’s daughter Alexandra Vladimirovna Trubetskaya also died in 1943 after 6 years of forced labor at a camp in Perm. She was 26. Again, we don’t know the charge.
And so a family was destroyed.
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October 30, 1942. #OTD Kaspar Kasparovich Armbrister, a carpenter of German nationality who earned his living working for an NKVD-run metallurgy outfit in Chelyabinsk, was executed at 41 years old.
Armbrister was born in Krasny Yar, a small settlement in Mordovia. He had only a primary school education. Executed on Article 58-2/10/11 charges, he was fully rehabilitated on March 15, 1960.
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October 29, 1937. #OTD Sergei Lvovich Sedov, an accomplished engineer and scientist; the second-born son of the revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who stayed in the USSR after his family was exiled to Turkey, was sentenced to death and executed on the same day at age 29.
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October 29-30, 1937. #OTD 132 Belarusians, mostly poets, statemen, and scientists, were executed in what has been dubbed "Чёрная ночь", the Black Night, in the NKVD's internal prison and the Pishchalauski Castle in Minsk. All were buried in the Kurapaty forest, pictured below.
ALT Kurapaty Forest, today
ALT The first memorial rally in the Kurapaty forest for the victims of the mass execution, 1988.
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October 30, 1937. #OTD Mikhail Osipovich Razumov, a Ukrainian Soviet stateman who held a litany of posts, the most notable of them being First Secretary of the Tatarstan Communist Party, was executed at age 42-43. He was rehabilitated; restored to the Order of Lenin in 2005.
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October 30, 1991. #OTD the “Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions” was officially established by the Supreme Soviet of the newly minted Russian Federation to honor the victims of repression in the former Soviet Union. This day of mourning was unofficially practiced by many citizens of the Soviet Union from the mid-70s, known then as the “Day of the Political Prisoner in the USSR.”
Today, we’d like to remind you that activists and organizations who spread awareness of the atrocities of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes are being actively repressed by the government of the Russian Federation. In December, 2021, Memorial, a long-running post-Soviet international human rights organization, whose databases and research have been invaluable for our work here in our small corner of the internet, was liquidated by the Russian government on the grounds that it violated the 2012 “foreign agent” law, a law that has increasingly become a major tool for the authoritarian, oligarchic Putinist regime since its introduction, but especially since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Without memory, we run the risk of forgetting the horrors wrought by man upon man, and spiraling into a repetition of these events (as we are seeing today, in the actions undertaken by the states of Israel and Russia). Just as important as it is to remember and understand the victims of the Third Reich, the colonial and imperialist governments of Great Britain, France, Spain, the United States, et al., so must we do the same for the victims of Stalinist and post-Stalinist repression, what was done to all of them, and why.
ALT Masks of Sorrow, a monument to victims of political repression in the former Soviet Union, specifically those of the GULAG system, in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
October 28, 1937. #OTD Aboni Troylokovich Mukharji, an Indian national who was a Bolshevik from 1920-1937, and who was both an MSU professor in the History of Colonial and Dependent Countries, and a director at the Indo-Tibetan Office of the Institute of Oriental Studies at the USSR Academy of Sciences, was executed at age 47. His execution was signed off on by Stalin himself. He can be seen at no. 52 on the execution list shown.
His wife, Roza Solomonovna Fitinghoff, had been a secretarial assistant to Vladimir Lenin in her youth. She was a Jewish woman from Riga. After her husband’s arrest she was incarcerated at the Akmola camp for wives of traitors to the Motherland. She survived.
Both Aboni Troylokovich Mukharji and Roza Solomonovna Fitinghoff were rehabilitated in 1956.
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October 28, 1941. #OTD Yakov Vladimirovich Smushkevich, commander of the Soviet Air Forces from 1939-1940, a leading general in the Spanish Civil War, and the first Jewish Hero of the Soviet Union (twice awarded, in fact), was executed at 39 years old on trumped up charges of participation in an "anti-Soviet conspiracy." He was rehabilitated in 1954.
October 27, 1937. #OTD Alexander Kupriyanovich Komarovsky, a Belarusian national from the small village of Dobrinevo in Minsk region, was executed at age 60. He earned his living as a security guard at a brick factory in Smolensk.
Komarovsky was arrested on Article 58-10 charges (anti-Soviet agitation) and executed after only one month in custody.
He is interred at the Katyn Memorial Complex, which contains the bodies of not only the almost 22,000 Poles murdered in the Katyn Massacre, but also thousands of Soviet citizens killed during the terror.
Alexander Kupriyanovich Komarovsky was rehabilitated on March 31, 1989, by the Smolensk Region Prosecutor's Office.
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October 27, 1937. #OTD Ernest Karlowitsch Dresen, a vital figure in the early Soviet Esperantist movement, was pulled under in the radical reversal of the Soviet attitude towards Esperanto in the late thirties, and executed at age 44. He was rehabilitated in 1957.
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October 27, 1938. #OTD Khadija Osman bey qizi Gayibova, an Azeri woman born in Tiflis who had the privilege (and curse) of being one of the earliest professional female pianists in Azerbaijan, was executed by firing squad following a fifteen-minute court hearing at age 45.
ALT This picture of our subject reminds us of the American anarchist theoretician Emma Goldman. Perhaps it's just the pince-nez.
October 27, 1937. #OTD Rosa Yakovlevna Mitelman and Dmitry Mikhailovich Pines, a married Jewish couple, were executed in Arkhangelsk. The couple had been tried together on October 23, 1937, convicted of belonging to a fictitious Socialist Revolutionary terrorist organization, and condemned to death.
Rosa was a doctor at the Institute for the Protection of Mothers and Children in Leningrad. She was 45.
Dmitry was a literary critic who specialized in the works of Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely. He was 47.
Dmitry had been previously arrested on Article 58 charges and exiled to Arkhangelsk; Rosa, who remained in Leningrad, would visit him when she could, and on that basis was accused of being a liaison between an SR cell in Leningrad and the invented SR cell in Arkhangelsk.
In 1956 the couple were retried (in absentia, it goes without saying) and it was proven that there had been no such SR cell operating in Arkhangelsk in 1937, and it had been a fiction created by one Junior Lieutenant Semyonov.
Both Rosa and Dmitry were immediately rehabilitated.
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October 26, 1937. #OTD Henryk Stein-Domski, a Polish left-communist, brief leader of the Communist Party of Poland (KPP), chairman of the Polish section of the Moscow Association of Proletarian Writers, and a Left/United Oppositionist was executed by gunshot at age 54.
