30 October 1974 was the first Day of Political Prisoners in the USSR, an initiative organised by imprisoned Soviet dissidents, led by Kronid Liubarsky, for the recognition of inmates’ status as political prisoners. Since 1991 the day has officially been marked as the Day of Victims of Political Repression. This year events took place online because of the Coronavirus.
One of the main commemorative events takes place on Lubyanka Square by the Solovetsky Stone in front of the Polytechnial Museum on 29 October each year. This annual event organised by Memorial is called “Return of the names” (Russian: Возвращение имён); participants read lists of the victims of communist terror. Source: ‘Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions,’ Wikipedia
RFE/RL, Thursday, 29 October 2020: An annual ceremony to commemorate thousands of people executed during communist dictator Josef Stalin’s Great Terror has been held in Moscow and some other Russian cities online due to the coronavirus pandemic. Russian Ombudswoman Tatyana Moskalkova launched the 12-hour ceremony, known as Returning the Names, on YouTube on the morning of October 29. The Moscow-based Memorial Human Rights Center has held the ceremony every year since 2006 at the Solovki Stone memorial on Moscow’s Lubyanka Square, which is the site of the former headquarters of the Soviet KGB and current headquarters of the successor Federal Security Service (FSB). Participants — relatives of the dead, rights activists, and others — read aloud the names, ages, occupations, and dates of executions of some of the estimated 1 million or more Soviet citizens executed by Stalin’s regime in 1937-38. The ceremony, which is held each year ahead of the October 30 Day of Commemoration of the Victims of Political Repressions in Russia, was barred in several Russian cities this year due to coronavirus restrictions.
