By Andrew Osborn
MOSCOW, April 23 (Reuters) - Four European states have accused Russia of trying to destroy the memory of Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s crimes against his own people after a monument to Russians and other people executed by his secret police was dismantled in Siberia.
Residents of the city of Tomsk woke up on Sunday to discover that a memorial complex to victims of Stalin’s secret police, including a so-called “Stone of Grief” and a memorial arch, had been dismantled overnight.
The mayor’s office initially posted a statement saying it had acted after an unnamed resident warned that a nearby garage built on a slope could collapse. It later deleted the explanation and has since declined to comment.
The Tomsk memorial complex was built on the site of a suspected grave of people shot dead by the NKVD secret police whose former prison building, now a museum, overlooks the area.
The complex was dedicated to people killed at various periods in Soviet history, including Stalin’s 1937-38 “Great Terror”, in which nearly 700,000 people were executed, according to conservative official estimates.
“We express a strong protest against this barbaric act and demand the restoration in Tomsk of this place of memory,” said a statement from the embassies of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia addressed to the Russian Foreign Ministry on Thursday.
It said memorial stones to their own murdered citizens had also been taken away.
“It is necessary to preserve the memory of the victims so that the crimes of the past are not repeated. It’s not possible to destroy memory!” the embassies said.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova did not directly respond to the statement during a news briefing on Friday, but hit back by noting that the three Baltic countries had dismantled hundreds of monuments to the Soviet army which she said had liberated the three countries from Nazi Germany during World War Two at enormous cost.
She said the Baltic states had also illegally exhumed and reburied the remains of Red Army troops.
“Russia will continue to use all available measures to counter the barbaric actions of the Baltic states, and we will continue to seek an appropriate response from international bodies,” said Zakharova, who has made similar complaints against Poland.
All four countries - which are helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia - saw the Red Army as occupiers rather than liberators.
SUPREME COURT RULING
The removal of the Tomsk memorial complex follows a ruling by Russia’s Supreme Court this month to designate human rights group Memorial, which documented repression in the Soviet Union, as an “extremist” movement.
It said Memorial was “anti-Russian in nature” and engaged in “eroding historical, cultural, spiritual, and moral values,” assertions rejected by Memorial, whose work inside Russia is now banned.
The removal also follows a request by Andrei Lugovoi, a prominent nationalist lawmaker, for the authorities to “check” the legality of the Solovetsky Stone in central Moscow - one of Russia’s main monuments to Stalin’s victims.
Lugovoi said it was a rallying point for Western ambassadors to visit annually in a gesture which he said seeks to divide Russians and buttress what he casts as false criticism of current authorities.
Moscow’s museum dedicated to the Gulag - the network of prison camps which existed in Soviet times - is being repurposed into a museum focused on Nazi Germany’s crimes against Soviet citizens during World War Two.
President Vladimir Putin this week also signed a decree renaming the academy of the FSB security service, the main successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, after Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police and an architect of the so-called Red Terror.
(Additonal reporting by Fillip Lebedev Editing by Timothy Heritage)
