#9
BBC Monitoring
Russia: Declassified Stalin-era documents go on show in
Yekaterinburg
Source: NTV, Moscow, in Russian 0900 gmt 8 Nov 01
[Presenter] An exhibition has opened in Yekaterinburg this week at the Sverdlovsk Region state archive.
Unique documents have been declassified for the first time covering the period of Stalinist represssions.
Our correspondent Viktor Kuzmin reports from Yekaterinburg:
[Correspondent] In the 1930s this poster depicting the leader of the people hung in a secondary school in the village of Yegorshino. From the school's main display board it was taken to the NKVD [secret police] directorate and became one of the pieces of evidence for accusing enemies of the people of anti-Soviet agitation. The school's director and several teachers became the accused. In the case it says that the Stalin portrait had been shot with a catapult.
[Tatyana Trofimova, Regional archive official] I get the feeling that this poster [words indistinct] since 1937. Perhaps it has been affected by wear and tear, but we haven't found any holes from a catapult here But nonetheless the school's director was sentenced to 10 years in the camps. Two other teachers were sentenced to three and five years in labour camps.
[Correspondent] The Regional archive has about a dozen cases involving accusations of espionage and anti-Soviet agitation in its exhibition. The archive has been replenished with declassified documents from the power-wielding departments and the main materials here are connected with the period of mass represssions.
A sentence of three years in a labour camp was almost given for this collection of photographs of Soviet officials and students of the Uralsk Mining Institute. The group of young people was accused of keeping photographs of Trotskiy, Bukharin and Rykov at home. Many of those accused didn't even imagine that they were involved in this anti-Soviet agitation.
However, such cases are depicted at the exhibition: A poster depicting Lenin and Stalin hung for a long time in the flat of a factory worker. The image of Iosip Vissarionovich [Stalin] had been crossed out with a pencil. Among the documents there is also a case involving workers at the music and comedy theatre. A conductor and a ballerina were deemed agents working for Japanese intelligence.
Historians say that mass repressions against dissidents began as early as 1918. Incidentally, Lenin's cousin, Viktor Ardashev, was also shot in Yekaterinburg. He died because he supported a constituent assembly. Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] sent telegrams to Yekaterinburg asking for an investigation into the reasons why his relative was killed, but there was no reply.
This cross on the outskirts of Yekaterinburg appeared a few years ago. It was put up to honour the memories of victims of political represssions. In 1937 alone, about 6,000 people were shot to death here. In terms of numbers of people subjected to repressions, Sverdlovsk Region held third place in the Soviet Union after Moscow and the Caucasus.
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