Tomsk City Hall removed memorial pillars bearing the names of those repressed. Neither the requests of the descendants of those executed nor the flash mobs of Tomsk residents in support of the activists' initiative helped.
The pillars were no longer there by Wednesday evening, October 16. “I went to check on Tuesday evening, they were stillе were. And on Wednesday, my daughter was out for a walk and alreadyе, nothing but holes", — they said NotMoscow local residents.
Correspondent NotMoscow I visited the site where the memorial pillars were installed. They have all been dismantled.
Memorial pillars on the mountain Kashtak activists have established September 22 - Portraits and stories of 30 people shot at this place hang on five poles. October 11 - City Hall Tomsk demanded The pillars were to be demolished as "unauthorized structures." Otherwise, officials promised to dismantle them themselves. However, negotiations to legalize the memorial pillars later began, but they came to nothing.
Descendants of those executed, as well as concerned Tomsk residents, have spoken out. Tomsk City Hall has received more than ten letters from relatives of those repressed alone, asking that the memorial pillars not be torn down.
"They erected memorial columns without permission from the architecture department, but they don't offend anyone, either in their appearance or content. Therefore, I supported the flash mob and wrote to the mayor that it's no secret that thousands of people were laid to rest in this place by criminal intent. Therefore, modern people have every right to know who's there. Otherwise, we'll bury these people again, this time simply destroying their memory." explained one of the Tomsk residents.
In total, about nine thousand people were shot in the ravines of Tomsk's Kashtak. Among them, for example, was a translator. Herbert Zuckau — the author of the first translation of Jaroslav Hašek's novel about the soldier Švejk, a spa specialist Vyacheslav Kurlov — the son of the founder of the therapeutic school of Siberia and one of the first female surgeons in Russia, a geologist and soil scientist Rostislav Ilyin - one of the authors of the hypothesis about the oil and gas potential of Western Siberia, a poet Nikolay Klyuev and philologist-Slavist Grigory Ilyinsky.
Their names were on the pillars.
In 2003, a nine-meter-tall memorial cross was erected on Mount Kashtak. At its foot is a granite slab bearing the inscription, "Eternal Memory to the Innocent Victims."
