On October 30, 2001,the Remembrance Day for the Victims of Political Repressions, about 2,000 people gathered at Lubyanskaya Ploschad (Ed. where the former KGB building is located) in the centre of Moscow to commemorate the dead.

Today flowers and funeral candles can be seen everywhere around the Solovetsky Stone erected in remembrance of Gulag victims (Ed *Solovki was one of the largest concentration camps for political prisoners and was described in "The Archipelago Gulag” by Solzhenitsin ).

The leaders of Yabloko and the Union of Right-Wing Forces (SPS) Grigory Yavlinsky and Boris Nemtsov, other deputies of the State Duma of the Russian Federation and the Moscow City Duma, representatives of the embassies of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Latvia and Estonia, and former political prisoners were present.

Addressing the meeting the Head of the Commission for Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repressions under the President of the Russian Federation Alexander Yakovlev said that within two or three years the process of rehabilitating Gulag prisoners will be officially finished, "but only officially, and we should do all we can to make sure that our people don't forget all those who died in camps."

Yakovlev also called on the Russian authorities to erect a monument to commemorate the victims of political repressions at Lubyanka Ploschad.

Representatives of the Memorial association proposed the creation of a Memory Lane in the garden by the Solovetsky Stone, burying here urns containing the ashes of victims who died in camps established by Lenin and Stalin.

At the end of the ceremony, a number of people - representatives of the authorities and society - laid flowers and wreaths on the Solovetsky Stone until it disappeared under a mass of flowers.

"State terrorism differs from the terrorism confronted by the international community confronts today”, Yavlinsky told journalists at the end of the meeting, “the specific trait of the state terrorism is that it eliminates the best people." "The best people in our country who were the victims of state terrorism lie under this stone. Every year we think about the time when our country will repress state terrorism forever and will seek repentance for its actions," Yabloko’s leader stressed.

See also:

"Children of the "Enemies of the Nation" Gathered by the FSB Building", by Alla Tuchkova