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Mourners gather to remember victims of repression

EVERY year on September 5 relatives and friends of victims of Stalin's murderous political repression gather at a modest plinth in the shadow of St Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress to commemorate the start of the Red Terror.  Linda Jones reports.

They came not only to remember their dead, but to remind the living of their loss.  Some were decorated with medals, others with photos of loved-ones who had perished on the whim of a tyrant. Some cried openly, while many more were lost in a silent world of darkness and grief.

Natalia Konstantinova was nine years old when her father was shot. He had been arrested seven months earlier, accused of designing a bomb to assassinate Stalin.

But, confides Natalia, now 67, her father's fate remained a painful mystery for half a century. She was repeatedly told he had suffered a heart attack when she demanded answers.

In 1989 officials admitted he was shot. But to this day Alexander Konstantinov's daughter has not been told where he was buried. She is sure it was in his home city of Leningrad.

"I came here because all my life has been connected with the terrible events that took place in our country. My father was one of Russia's leading specialists in television technology. "He was the first person in this country to develop the electronic tube. But, as I got to know from the KGB documents 50 years later, they never asked him about his work.

"It hurts me greatly that they killed him without knowing his great talent or putting it to some use.

"He was accused of preparing a device to assassinate Stalin. He was among a group of outstanding Leningraders, from the university, geological and astronomy institutes. All of them were very young, aged 35 to 40, my father was 41.

"My father was shot on May 26, 1937. On September 1 that year my mother was arrested and spent eight years in Magadan, in the furthest corner of Russia as a member a traitor's family.

"My grandmother, my sister and I, who were aged 10 and 12, were sent into exile in the Orenburg Region.
My sister and I stayed there seven years, my grandmother, nine.

"Up to now I have learned the date my father was shot but they have never told me his place of burial. I have read the documents. They say there are no documents about where he was shot or buried. "My father was born here, christened here and worked here. Leningrad was his home. All his life was connected with the city. I know he died and was buried here too.

"It is important that we do not forget. But it is also important that we repent and think about the future."

Natalia was just one face in the 100-strong crowd at Troitskaya Square, where a simple rectangular marble stone was installed five years ago to honour Stalin's victims.

Today it is flanked by a blue banner bearing the name "Memorial." Enraged old men are shouting red-faced through a megaphone about the horrors of the past and the dangers of the future. Memorial is a charity, set up six years ago, with Andrei Sakharov at the forefront, to create a living testament to the dead.

Natalia explains the Red Terror is the name given to mass repression which began in the days of Lenin. Twenty years later came the Great Terror, of which Alexander Konstantinov was a victim. It was also known as Yezhovshchina, and lasted from 1937 until December, 1938. Its Russian name comes from Nikolai Yezhov, the then head of the secret police.

Memorial spokesman Benjamin Iofe says its members are getting younger.

"There are people here who weren't even born when it all happened," he says.
At least a million of the eight million people arrested during the dark days of the purges, are thought to have been executed. And according to Mr Iofe, tens of thousands more innocent people were thrown into Stalin's labor camps - countless victims never returned.

"We come here every year, we discuss the past and talk about the years to come. We will never forget what happened and must strive to make sure it doesn't happen again."

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From: The St Petersburg Press, now St Petersburg Times

Learning the hard way

AFTER spending three hours desperately trying to go around a corner backwards, my instructor's patience was near breaking point...

"Linda I could teach a bloody monkey better than you!" he barked - and I felt precisely two inches tall.

He'd spent the last hour yelling expletives at me as I hit the kerb, went wide or stalled the engine, time after painful time.

My palms were sweating, the adrenaline was surging and my heart was pounding.

I wanted to cry and nearly did.

Little did I know my tormentor was set to quit his job as a driving instructor the very next day and would be venting his anger in the local nick as a trainee prison officer.

But I got my own back - he didn't know that my best mate's dad was one of the prison bosses.

"Do you want me to make it a bit rough for him, Linda?" he asked me. Is it wrong of me to admit I smiled to myself as I answered... "Oh, if you must?"

(Continues)

Extract from The Sunday Sun.

Little smiling flower wiped out by coward

TIME stood still in the tiny village of Scey sur Saone as thousands of mourners gathered to pay silent tribute to murdered hitch-hiker Celine Figard.

Not a single shop, bar or restuarant remained open for miles around as a shroud of grief united the sleepy farming communities of the Haute Saone region of France.

They came to see Celine laid to rest amid a sea of flowers alongside her grandmother Suzanne in a cemetery kilometres from her home in the neighbouring village of Ferrieres les Scey.

Father Philippe Jeanerod said before the service: "It's impossible to know what to say in the face of such wickedness. It is the same the world over. How can we adequately express our feelings at such a time?"

Mourners of all ages defied the biting cold to climb the winding streets the 18th century hill-top church of St Martin. A strident peal of bells shattered the sombre silence.

(Continues)

£15,000 will buy you Gloucester's House of Horrors

ALMOST two years after police started digging up bodies at 25 Cromwell Street, it remains a ghoulish tourist attraction.

But Malvern entrepreneur Keith Gardner hopes developers will not buy up the house and turn it into a macabre museum.

He has launched a campaign to buy it and turn it into a memorial garden for the victims.

The modest three-storey Victorian semi stands empty, the windows are bricked up, the metal gates padlocked and the garden cleared.

Yet a steady stream of onlookers continues to flock to the so-called House of Horrors and Garden of Death, eager to see for themselves the grim final resting place of nine young women and girls.

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Extracts from the Worcester Evening News.

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