Small gatherings have been held in several Russian cities to mark the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions, even as the Russian government continues carrying out the harshest crackdown on dissent in the post-Soviet period.
Since 2006, the Memorial human rights group -- which has been banned and shut down by the government of President Vladimir Putin -- has organized gatherings under the name Returning the Names at which people read out the names of victims of repression under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
This year, about 200 locals in the western Siberian city of Tomsk gathered for the first Returning the Names event since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. Small gatherings were also held in Pskov, Kirov, and Ulyanovsk.
In Moscow, city authorities banned the gathering, citing anti-pandemic restrictions on public gatherings that remain in place despite the lifting of other COVID-19 measures. Memorial held its ceremony online.
"This event is about the fact that nothing is more precious than human life and that the government did not have the right to murder people in 1937 and it does not have that right in 2022," Memorial wrote in a post on Twitter.
SEE ALSO: At 70, Is Putin Still The Russian Public's Irreplaceable Man?In Kazan, authorities withdrew their permission for a Returning the Names gathering just one day before the event. In Perm, an exhibition about political repressions that was to open in a city library was cancelled. In Samara, police detained activist Andrei Zhvankin for conducting a one-man picket at an authorized protest for displaying a banner reading, "Putin's repressions are a continuation of Stalin's."
Returning the Names events were held in numerous cities abroad, including Berlin, Istanbul, Tbilisi, Paris, Vilnius, and others. At many of the events, speakers spoke against Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
Under Stalin, millions of Soviet citizens were killed, tortured, imprisoned, or exiled by the Soviet state.
Nostalgia for Stalin and for the Soviet Union has flourished under Putin, a former KGB officer who has praised the dictator as an "effective manager."