“Remember this history”
Arseny Roginsky on “The return of the names”
Arsenij Roginskij, Ivan Urgant
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Every year since 2006, people gather on the Lubyanka Square in Moscow on the 29th of October. They meet in front of the headquarters of the NKVD, the Soviet secret service, which is now occupied by the FSB. At the memorial stone commemorating the victims of Stalinism, they read out the names of the individuals who lost their lives during the terror, and light candles. Through this intimate act of remembrance, they bestow dignity to the victims, as well as one of the inalienable rights of any individual, which was denied to them by the Stalinist regime: the right to their own name and their own grave.
(Osteuropa 11-12/2017, pp. 89–95)