New Tragic Memorial Opens at a Stalinist Mass Execution Site
Names of over 20,000 political persecution victims have been set in stone in the Memory Garden memorial. It was opened today on the Butovo range near Moscow. The memorial looks like it opens a shooting ground. If you go down, you'll find yourself where dead bodies were lying in the 1930s. Olga Meshcheryakova reports on the memory that's stronger than death.
20,762 shot and thrown into the pit, covered with dirt, leveled with sand and gravel, to be forgotten. Now a memory. The bell rings in retaliation for those, who in the dark 1937 shot and signed the shooting lists. A symbolic mortuary ditch, below the ground level.
Thousands of names are set in stone on the walls. People walk by, stop, and recognize familiar names. They took him away, we never saw him again. Rodin Ivan, 1905, they came at night. They took two of them. They were all accused of malicious intent.
All 8 people were shot on September 28th, 1937, here, on the Butovo range. Two scary, bloody years, 1937 and 1938. Hundreds of people were shot and buried here every day. Where 13 hills used to rise, the Memory Gardens are now located. If you don't silence the country's memory, its history, if it's not altered to fit the constantly changing ideologies, if this history is full of victories and defeats, any one of us can be proud of this honest history.
Every citizen of this country can be proud, this history forms a united nation. We need this to keep growing, because these people who died then, they are our spiritual roots. Apple gardens have been here since Tsarist times.
They're now surrounded by granite blocks for 300 meters. It all seems endless, the ditch, the black blocks, the scary lists. People walk by, peering through every line, believing and knowing that these historic memory gardens cannot be shot or destroyed.
Olga Meshcheryakova, Aleksandr Kosenkov, Anna Kolk, Aleksandr Kucherovsky, Dmitry Belous, Vesti.