Destruction for security purposes
Why did authorities destroy a memorial park in Tomsk?
Author: Andrey Filimonov
On the night of April 19, 2026, a memorial to the victims of political repression was dismantled in Tomsk. It was located in the city center, in a park across from City Hall, and consisted of six objects: the Stone of Sorrow, erected in 1992, and five national stones erected in the 6st century in honor of the peoples deported en masse to Siberia under Stalin: Kalmyks, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians. Five separate tragedies, gathered in one place.
The nighttime dismantling was carried out quickly. In a special operation mode. As is customary these days.
The entire memorial complex, including the "NKVD Investigative Prison" museum, was created in collaboration with Memorial, one of the most hated public organizations by the current Russian authorities. On April 9, 2026, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, in a closed hearing, "designated the international movement Memorial as extremist." In practice, this means that from now on, any citizen deemed by Russian authorities to be a member of an "extremist movement" faces criminal prosecution and a prison sentence of three to six years. And monuments erected with Memorial's assistance can now be treated with utmost rigor.
State Duma Deputy Andrei Lugovoi has already demanded (April 12) check the Solovetsky Stone on Lubyanka and other memorials to victims of political repression for extremism.
"Aren't these memorial sites a symbol of substitution? A way to justify extremism, separatism, and direct action against Russia," said the State Duma deputy, who has been serving for 19 years. wanted by British police for the murder of defector Alexander Litvinenko.
Lugovoy counted 1500 "suspicious" memorial sites across the country. Each one commemorates the crimes of the Soviet regime. According to Memorial, 3,102,000 people fell victim to political terror in the USSR. And these are only the proven cases.
"The Cheka-OGPU-NKVD-MGB-KGB arrested 6,9 million people, and 5,8 million were forcibly resettled. According to our estimates, the database of victims of political repression must contain at least 12 million people." говорил Member of the board of the international Memorial, Yan Rachinsky, presenting the updated Memorial database in 2017.
If Memorial hadn't been banned, its staff would likely have been able to document the figure of 12 million, which represents more than 5 percent of the country's population. This means that at least one in twenty residents has been imprisoned or at least exiled, "for no apparent reason." In criminal jargon, such a policy is called "lawlessness." And for the Russian Federation, which declared itself the legal successor to the USSR, inheriting an openly criminal regime is a serious blow to its reputation. It's easier to label those who disturb collective memory with the names of the repressed as extremists. Because the list of victims is only one step away from the list of executioners. And this touches on sensitive areas of Russian power. Many people, from Lugovoi to Putin, have emerged from the KGB.
It is therefore not surprising that Tomsk authorities rushed bulldozers to the memorial square on the night of April 18-19.
According to an eyewitness, the equipment worked quickly and roughly—the memorial stones were removed with buckets and without any respect. The scene was guarded by police officers, who prohibited passersby from filming the destruction of the memorial.
The next morning, a fence appeared where the park had been, again under police guard. Those who came too close or lingered too long were asked for an explanation. Literally, "On whose orders are you inquiring about the renovation work?" After this question, no one had any doubt that another special operation to erase an inconvenient memory was underway. The void surrounded by the fence gaped like a fresh wound.
“They just took and cut out a piece of our history,” said an intelligent-looking passerby and walked away in the direction of the university, wishing to remain anonymous.
"Before the war, people would have come out [to protest]. But now they're afraid," said a woman walking with a friend in the April snowfall.
"They wouldn't have had time to get out," my friend objected. "They did it all overnight. They would have been working on road repairs like that."
"No, we don't remember what happened here," said the two-meter-tall teenagers, peering over the fence. "A memorial to the repressions? Yeah, well, they told us something about that at school."
Once upon a time, Tomsk was not so frightened and indifferent.
Take the country out of circulation
Once upon a time, about 20 years ago, Tomsk was considered an island of freedom. It was ruled by the good-natured Governor Kress, a descendant of exiled Germans. The liberal television company TV-2 broadcast here, and its president, Arkady Maiofis, was the grandson of deported Latvian Jews. And finally, there was the NKVD Investigative Prison Museum. A unique museum, few like it in the entire country. It boasted a vast database compiled from thousands of interviews recorded by the tireless Vasily Khanevich, the museum's director since 1994. Victims of repression, those fortunate enough to survive the camps and prisons, and their children and grandchildren came here to tell their stories and share surviving documents.
It so happened that in June 1994 the "Investigative Prison" I visited Alexander Solzhenitsyn, solemnly returning from exile across the country and stopping in Tomsk, stood in silence at the Stone of Sorrow and wrote in the museum's guest book: "I am pleased with your initiative to restore the terrible details of the communist past."
The museum considers Solzhenitsyn its first honorary visitor.
The founders of the Tomsk Memorial, historian Boris Trenin, human rights activists and dissidents Nikolai Kashcheev, Wilhelm Fast, Nikolai Kandyba and other employees, simply wanted to restore historical justice. decision The Tomsk City Council of People's Deputies' resolution of June 13, 1989, states: "In order to restore justice for the victims of Stalin's repressions, the Executive Committee has decided to establish a 'Memorial Square in Memory of the Victims of Stalin's Repressions' in the center of Tomsk..." So, the global conspiracy and George Soros have absolutely nothing to do with it. Both the museum and the Memorial Square were a "perestroika" decision by the local Soviet government.
For a long time, the post-Soviet authorities of Tomsk not only coexisted with this Tomsk memorial site, but even favored it. Various famous guests, both from Moscow and abroad, were brought here. The museum seemed to become an integral part of university-run Tomsk. Toward the end of his tenure, Governor Kress even considered making this museum the core of a large-scale museum project dedicated to the city's political history. He even secured a substantial federal grant for this project—200 million rubles. But after the governor's replacement, the idea petered out, and the federal funds were put to other uses, a purpose for which Tomsk journalists, a decade and a half ago, were unable to obtain a coherent answer.
The ideologists of the current regime believe that they have learned from the mistakes of their predecessors, so they are uprooting memorial stones and simultaneously “reinventing” the history of the Memorial as a hostile international organization. article "Khanevich's Khan," published on a local loyalist website, about Vasily Khanevich's dismissal as museum director, stated that the Memorial "continues to fulfill a global task set at the dawn of perestroika. Initially, the goal was to facilitate the collapse of the USSR. Then, by supporting the most false and speculative myths that denigrate our Soviet history, so-called liberals and human rights activists took on an equally global task: equating communism with fascism and removing the entire Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation as the Soviet Union's successor, from circulation."
Read our article "The Unwanted Khanevich" The dismissal of the historian who created the NKVD Investigative Prison Museum
The article doesn't explain who set this task and how a handful of journalists and historians could "take an entire country out of circulation." It assumes the reader already understands the global backstage. However, the primary source of the narrative is obvious—good old Article 58, dedicated to anti-Soviet activities.
Using a stencil
In the fall of 2014, vandals appeared in the Memory Square area for the first time: unknown individuals smashed about thirty decorative lamps in the square and removed the light bulbs. It's hard to believe that someone could remain anonymous after smashing 30 lampposts opposite City Hall, but Tomsk police were unable to find the culprits. In the summer of 2015, another pogrom occurred: more broken lampposts, broken benches, and paint stains on the Stone of Sorrow. In September of that year, unknown individuals done There's a yellow graffiti on the stone: "Stalin." The police conducted an investigation, but the results were not released.
In November 2016, museum staff discovered a portrait of Stalin on a rock. Vasily Khanevich specifically noted that a stencil had been used. This wasn't a spontaneous prank—the act had been planned in advance.
Each time, the stone was cleansed. And each time, it seemed as if life went on. It seemed…
The gradual destruction of the memorial began long before April 2026. It seeped through prohibitions and postponements.
For many years, the "Return of Names" event took place near the Tomsk Stone of Sorrow. However, it was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-19 restrictions. It took place in 2022, with over two hundred people attending.
In 2023, the event was initially approved, then cancelled a day before it was scheduled to begin. People still came to the stone with flowers. In 2024, authorities refused to allow the event to take place at its usual location, citing another event allegedly planned there. In 2025, the traditional event at the Stone of Sorrow was cancelled altogether.
Interestingly, in 2020, the Tomsk mayor's office and the United Russia party announced plans to improve the park. Project The project envisioned repaving the paths, replacing park furniture, upgrading the lighting, and installing ramps for people with disabilities. Then-mayor Ivan Klein expressed concern for the site: "Every year, thousands of Tomsk residents and visitors come here to honor the memory of the victims of political repression." In 2021, the work was indeed completed—the benches and lighting were updated. Five years later, they disappeared along with the memorial sites. The country has come a long way since then, to be sure.
Garage on a slope
The official explanation was almost mocking. A message appeared on the city hall website stating that a resident had filed a complaint about a possible garage collapse on the slope of a ravine, and the emergency commission had decided to close the area. The mayor's office then announced that all memorial objects had been "transferred for safekeeping" to the Department of Roads and Improvements. Both news items were soon deleted.
Residents began writing to Mayor Makhin and Governor Mazur on their Telegram channels. "The mayor's office has been silent for two days now, and is deleting en masse comments from residents in their Telegram channels asking about the appropriateness and reasons for removing the monuments," wrote one commenter. "As a result, Tomsk is being disgraced throughout Russia, not to mention the officials' absolute disrespect for the residents, for whom this place isn't just a park, but a place connected to the history of their ancestors, the history of the country."
The garage on the slope, which was supposedly in danger of collapsing and which wasn't even fenced in, was written about with undisguised irony. Someone wasn't afraid to walk through the park with the lights on. video recordingIt turned out that an unfenced pedestrian path runs between the "threatening garage" and the destroyed memorial. This means the garage poses a danger not to people walking two meters from its wall, but to the memorial sites 50 meters away.
"It seems the Tomsk mayor's office is lying," Ksenia Fadeeva, former head of Alexei Navalny's Tomsk campaign headquarters, wrote online. In recent years, Tomsk has made national and international news as a grim place, where a Putin opponent was poisoned and now a memorial park has been destroyed.
Incidentally, the NKVD Pre-Trial Prison Museum will now host an exhibition on the "genocide of the Soviet people during World War II." Similar exhibitions are currently being held throughout Russia.
Tomsk Region Governor Vladimir Mazur posted a message dedicated to Radonitsa on his Telegram channel a day after the memorial park's destruction.
"Tomorrow is Parents' Day," Mazur wrote. "On Radonitsa, it's customary to visit the graves of loved ones, clean up after the winter, and remember deceased relatives."
In the comments, he was asked how it was possible, on the eve of Ancestors' Remembrance Day, to destroy a memorial park connected to the history of both the city of Tomsk and the entire country?
The governor did not respond.
Stalin is with us
Of all Russian political parties, only Yabloko responded to the events in Tomsk. The last liberal party permitted in Russia views the dismantling of the park as a continuation of re-Stalinization.
The architects of this policy aim to "convince everyone that the state, both in the past and now, is right to persecute dissenters and dissent. To erase the memory that the repressions were a crime and that their victims were innocent. To pretend that there are no official decisions by Soviet and Russian authorities condemning Stalin's repressions," Yabloko's statement reads.
After the outbreak of the war with Ukraine, memorials to the victims of Stalinism were dismantled in Yakutsk, the Perm region, the Arkhangelsk and Tver regions, and at the Levashovskoye Cemetery in St. Petersburg. In November 2025, the "Leaders and Victims" monument was removed from Moscow's Muzeon Park.
The Tomsk Stone of Sorrow is not the first. But it certainly won't be the last. Deputy Lugovoy stated that the Supreme Court's decision to designate the Memorial as an extremist movement is "not the final word, but rather an ellipsis."
There will likely be reports soon about the dismantling of new memorial sites “for security reasons.”
