New Initiative of Kyrapaty Preservationists

Names of victims of Stalin repressions in Belarus must be revealed.

Activists of the society initiative "Experts for Defence of Kurapaty" intend to ask representatives of all confessions of Belarus for promotion of establishment of names of victims of Stalin repressions buried in Kurapaty.

On May 4 Marat Gorevoj, journalist and the member of the initiative, stated that during the press-conference, BelaPAN reports.

A written application is being developed now. It addresses to the heads of confessions in order to direct requests to higher state bodies and the country's leadership to provide information on people shot by the NKVD in 1930s. "For them to name those murdered priests of corresponding confessions and then other names. It is wrong when there are thousands of nameless victims," Gorevoj stressed.

The idea of the initiative emerged during the exibition last autumn in the House of Arts, Vintsuk Vyachorka, linguist and social and political activist, noted.

"Two women walked up to me. One of them turned to be a granddaughter of an Orthodox priest. They were spoken that his life had come to its end in Kurapaty or some other place of mass executions of Minsk. In despair they asked what could additionally be done to find out more information," Vyachorka said.

Marat Govevoj, in his turn, informed that on March 24 they had failed to appeal against the decision of the Ivan Moiseichyk, judge of the Tsentralny district of Minsk. Earlier, he refused to initiate an administrative case against "wrongful acts (inaction) of the General Procurator’s Office , which refuses to reveal names of those executed in Kurapaty."

First of all, the experts want the General Procurator’s Office named all victims of repressions of 1930s. Their remains were identified by an additional investigation of 1997-1999 in the framework of a criminal case initiated in 1988 against mass execution in Kurapaty.

Gorevoj noted that in December 2001 the researchers of a Kurapaty tragedy had learned from the Belarusian archaeologist Aleh Iov names of two of three dead people whose remains had been identified. They were Mordekhai Shuleskes and Moisha Kramer. Nevertheless, this information is still not officially confirmed.

In the middle of April this year, activists of the initiative addressed to Yuliya Rachinski-Spivakov, temporary representative of Israel in Belarus, to direct a request to Belarusian state bodies about fates of these three victims of the Stalin regime.