Today we publish a letter that came from one of our media subscribers. The author of this text has spent more than thirty years researching the fate of his grandfather - engineer Petr Petrovich Rempel, who died in the gulag camps in the 1940s. During this time, strange circumstances have come to light in the story - it is possible that Petr Petrovich was indeed involved in the underground work of resistance to Soviet power.

Memorial Krasnoyarsk has been collecting information about the victims of Soviet terror in Krasnoyarsk Krai since 1988. The group prepared a multi-volume Book of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions. Last year they published the registers of those deported from Lithuania to Krasnoyarsk Krai last year. Today, we want to talk about our colleagues' work on the echelon lists of Germans deported from the VG ASSR (Volga Germans Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic).

2024 marks the 80th anniversary of the  deportation of the Crimean Tatars, a crime perpetrated by Stalin’s regime. This is indeed a mournful date, particularly dark because repressions against Crimean Tatars continue to this day, arguably as a direct follow up to the Soviet period. Activists call this a “hybrid deportation.”