Activists of "Names Return" action in Volgograd commemorate victims of Stalin's repressions

At the "Names Return" action, Volgograd activists have read out names of victims of Stalin's repressions. The today's society should recognize the mistakes of the past and stop wars and persecution of dissidents, the activists have stated.

In Volgograd, 10 participants of the "Names Return" action gathered at the monument to victims of repression "Going to Heaven": they were members of the "Yabloko" Party and the "Memorial" initiative group. They laid flowers at the foot of the monument and one by one read out the names of the repressed people, their details, the time of arrest and execution. These are mainly the names of Stalingrad residents – engineers and factory workers sentenced to execution in the second half of the 1930s.

Activists of the Volgograd Regional Association of Victims of Political Repressions have restored the names of 250,000 repressed fellow countrymen; the rehabilitation process was completed only by 2016.

"We are returning the names of citizens who perished in the meat grinder that Bolsheviks staged for the sake of supposedly lofty goals, which were pure Satanism," Alexander Efimov, a co-organizer of the action, a member of the federal bureau of the "Yabloko" Party.

Tamara Grodnikova, an activist, said that there were repressed people in her family, but her relatives did not name them, "because they were afraid." "They were called people's enemies. But people did not make decisions about their fate. There was no democracy in the country, there was a dictatorship," she has stated, noting that the today's society has failed to fully realize its tragic past. "Without admitting their mistakes, the people and the country cannot develop," Ms Grodnikova has concluded.