The longest living memory... (For the 25-th anniversary of the release of the book the memory of the repressed residents of the Tomsk region The pain human)

One of the most terrifying pages in the Soviet state history was the mass unfounded repressions of the population without social, national or confessional differences. Those repressions concerned the majority of the local nations lived in the USSR. There was no precise program of repression victims' exoneration over the decades, only individual campaigns. The government returned to this subject repeatedly, but it was not ready to find a comprehensive solution. Exoneration activation used to be initiated by the Soviet party leaders and usually was related to some events. Only in late 1980s, the rehabilitation process became an organized planned activity. It was a result of acceptance of the whole range standard legal instruments for the purpose to reopen archive cases. It provided to reopen the tens of thousands archive investigatory records and to obtain the justice in relation to victims of lawlessness and illegality. Rehabilitation means either to perpetuate the memory of those, who were injured innocently. The creation of the first in the USSR Memorial Book of victims of political repressions in Tomsk Region "Bol Lyudskaya" (Human Pain) is one of the forms of such rehabilitation. It was written by Tomsk branch of KGB department officers. The first tome was published in 1991, the final fifth tome - in 1999. There was issued a special order of security services, which recommended publishing memorial books in all regions of the country. The author was participated in the process of preparation and printing the book. He understood its importance as prevention of non-admission the same in the future. After a quarter of the century after first edition publishing the new edition of the memorial book was developed. It was caused by revealing of several hundreds of purged people during the research, those people cases were saved in other archives. In addition, some parts of materials that were published in first edition of the Book needed to be specified, and the appendixes system should be completed. On the basis of published personal data materials analysis and on the documents that were supplemented in appendixes to every tomes of the Book the author was able to get the correct information for further thematic studying of the repression campaigns results and the rehabilitation campaigns in the country. Such factors of persecuted people as nationality, social position, educational background, sex, age were determined there. In addition, the punishment and adjudgment systems transformations, the differences in incrimination cases and other aspects of repressive policy were studied. In the author's opinion, the memorial books publishing became a successful form of perpetuation the memory of political repressions victims. Moreover, such name lists enable to avoid arbitrary interpretation of the numbers of victims and determine the real scale of the repressions that took place in the Soviet state history. But it should be noted that the work of perpetuation the names of the purged people is far from its completion.

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