In St. Petersburg, the memorial plaque of Anna Akhmatova disappeared from the facade of the former prison “Crosses”

In St. Petersburg, the memorial plaque of Anna Akhmatova disappeared from the facade of the former prison "Crosses"

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Memorials dedicated to political repressions continue to be destroyed in the Russian regions. This week in St. Petersburg, unknown people removed a memorial plaque with a famous quote from Anna Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” from the former Kresty prison. In it, the poetess asked to erect a monument to her near the pre-trial detention center, where she stood in long lines along with other relatives of those arrested. Boris Vishnevsky, deputy of the Yabloko faction in the legislature of the city, called on the governor of St. Petersburg, Alexander Beglov, to take urgent measures to return the board to its place.

At the beginning of the week, a memorial plaque to Anna Akhmatova with a portrait of the poetess and lines from her poem Requiem disappeared from the facade of the Krestov building. In “Crosses” in 1938-1939, the son of Akhmatova, the writer Lev Gumilyov, was sitting, the poetess wore parcels to him. In “Requiem” she wrote that a monument to her should be erected “here, where I stood for three hundred hours and where the bolt was not opened for me.” The same passage mentions the “rumble of black marus” – cars that came to arrest people. The absence of a memorial plaque was noticed by photographer Mikhail Burlatsky, who drew attention to this on social networks.

Recall that in the “Crosses” they stopped keeping those arrested only in 2017. At the end of May, the land plot and buildings of the Federal Penitentiary Service were transferred to the financial institution for development in the housing sector DOM.RF. The press service of DOM.RF reported that the employees did not remove the commemorative plaque. The company asked the Federal Penitentiary Service for information about the status of the plate. Edition 78.ru citing sources, the UFSIN reported that the tablet could have been stolen, but “no one is looking for it.”

Boris Vishnevsky, deputy of the Yabloko faction in the legislature of the city, appealed to the governor of St. Petersburg, Alexander Beglov, and the head of DOM.RF, Vitaly Mutko, demanding that urgent measures be taken.

Boris Vishnevsky called the removal of the plaque an “alarm bell” and recalled the disappearance of several tablets of the Last Address, a project in memory of the victims of Soviet repressions.

“The destruction of such things against the backdrop of new political repression is frightening. Not for the first time they are already trying to erase the reminders of the former, ”he wrote in his Telegram channel. Note that the authorities of St. Petersburg in the past expressed dissatisfaction with the signs of the “Last Address”. In particular, Alexander Mokhnatkin, ex-assistant to State Duma deputy Vitaly Milonov, complained about them. And the deputy head of the committee for urban planning and architecture of the city, Larisa Kanunnikova, even called their installation illegal.

Let us add that on June 15, Vice-Governor of St. Petersburg Nikolai Linchenko and Deputy Head of DOM.RF Denis Filippov signed an agreement on a comprehensive transformation of Krestov. An art cluster should appear on the site of the pre-trial detention center “while maintaining the historical and cultural significance of this territory.”

The disappearance of the plaque in memory of Akhmatova is not the first scandal around memorials in memory of the victims of repression. At the beginning of spring in the Perm region demolished a memorial in memory of Lithuanians and Poles sent into exile for logging. The monument was erected by the descendants of the exiles in the cemetery of the abandoned special settlement of Galyashor seven years ago. It is still unknown who exactly destroyed it.

Summer from the facades of buildings in Moscow started to disappear commemorative plaques of the memorial project “Last Address”, dedicated to the victims of repression. The activists of the project do not yet know exactly how many memorial signs have disappeared. Moscow City Duma deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov called what was happening “a planned action by unknown extremist Stalinist organizations” and filed a request with the police.

And this week it became known that unknown people in Yakutsk kidnapped commemorative plaques with the names of Poles who were exiled to the region and became prominent explorers of Yakutia. The municipal authorities are still looking for the organization on whose balance sheet the monument was located.

Andrey Kucherov, St. Petersburg

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