2017 – Year of commemoration of Stalin’s repressions victims
2017 will be announced the year of commemoration of the victims of Stalin’s repressions, historian Ihar Kuznyatsou told Euroradio.
"The organizing committee for the creation of the historical educational association Bringing Back Memories will gather in the BPF headquarters on January 18. The 80th anniversary of the peak of Stalin’s repressions of the 1930s (1937) will be marked this year. We are planning to announce 2017 the year of commemoration of Stalin’s repressions victims,” the historian said.
According to the official statistics, 600 thousand Belarusians became the victims of the terror. There were at least 200 thousand more of them, Ihar Kuznyatsou believes. They were ordinary people and representatives of the intellectual elite of the Belarusian renaissance of the 1920s. It is difficult to count all the repressed because Belarusians were sometimes eliminated far beyond Belarus’ borders – in GULAG.
About 130 representatives of the Belarusian intellectual elite – literary men, teachers and scientists – were killed in the building hosting the KGB Investigation Committee now on the night of October 29, 1937. Members of the Soviet administrative staff were among the repressed too. The death list was signed in Moscow but local KGB officials added a few more names to it on their own.
