On July 23, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko arrived in St. Petersburg to tell Vladimir Putin about the Wagner Group’s plans for “a trip” to Warsaw. The same day, at the Levachovo cemetery, located a few dozen kilometers from their meeting, the Consul General of Poland, Grégoire Sliubowski, noted the disappearance of the memorial to the Polish victims of the Stalinist repressions of 1938-1939. A concrete beam with the emblems of Poland, as well as a heavy engraved memorial stone – “We forgive and you forgive us” – all disappeared. Not even the tiled base of the monument remains.
The Levachovo cemetery is among the most emblematic places of the great Stalinist purges. During the 1930s, the political police threw into mass graves about 40,000 people accused of anti-Soviet activities. After the collapse of the USSR, memorials were erected on these mass graves. They honor the memory of Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Jews, Germans, Estonians and even Assyrians. These monuments have been preserved, except for the Ukrainian which has long been missing a phrase – “innocently killed” – on the memorial plaque.
According to Saint Petersburg authorities, the Polish memorial was damaged by unknown vandals, and it was later removed for restoration. This official word is questioned by Grégoire Sliubowski. “Me, indicates the consul general of Poland, I have no information on the place where the memorial is and in what state it is. We sent a note to the Russian Foreign Ministry, but we haven’t received a response yet,” he said.
This is the fifth disappearance of a Polish monument since the beginning of the year and the ninth since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. “It’s hard to believe in coincidences,” says the diplomat of a country that Russian propaganda places at the very top of its list of enemy nations, just behind Ukraine.
The first damaged monuments were reported in Tomsk Oblast, a region of western Siberia populated in part by Polish voluntary or deported migrants since the mid-19th century. On November 11, 2022, Polish Independence Day, unknown people broke the plaque commemorating the tortured in Tomsk. Local activists replaced it with a paper version, but the poster was also torn from the stele.
A few weeks later, plaques were smashed and the cross broken from the memorial in Polozovo, a now abandoned village, located 150 km from the regional capital. Unidentified people then destroyed the memorial in another village, Belostok, where most of the men with Polish names were killed during the years 1938-1939.
These degradations were committed by the same officials, says Vasili Khanevich, one of the founders of the museum on the detention center of the NKVD, the ancestor of the KGB, in Tomsk. “It’s a response from ‘Russian patriots’, a way for them to express their patriotism,” he said. According to him, the attackers were well prepared, since they needed a truck to arrive on the scene in winter, and a grinder to dismantle the constructions.
Police have yet to arrest anyone, although criminal proceedings over the theft have been ongoing for more than six months. “As long as the situation remains the same, with authorities who tacitly approve of such actions, there is no point in wasting effort and money restoring the memorials”, regrets this historian.
In April 2023, researchers working at the Center of Historical Memory set up in the Ural region of Perm Krai said that there is no longer a memorial to the Poles and Lithuanians who died in Galyachor. This village, now uninhabited, welcomed deportees in 1945. The monument, consisting of a concrete base and two wooden planks forming a cross on which the names of the deceased were inscribed, had no official status. The researchers were fighting precisely for its recognition by the regional government. But this village is only one of a thousand villages of deportees in the region, so it does not deserve a specific memorial, the authorities retorted.
A month later, the memorial to the victims of repressions in Irkutsk oblast also disappeared. The tombstone dedicated to the Poles and a cross in memory of the Lithuanians were torn off. The authorities explained that this memorial blocked the opening of a passage in a park subject to works.
Then in Buryatia, in a small village on the shores of Lake Baikal, a cross erected in memory of the 1866 revolt, launched by the Polish deportees who were working on the construction of the Circum-Baïkal railway, was destroyed. This monument had the good fortune to bring back bad memories to the local inhabitants.
Last July, the plaque dedicated to the Poles, prisoners of the Russian Empire, was removed from the walls of the Orechek fortress, located near Saint Petersburg. Museum staff hid their emotion, as it may have been a decision by a local official.
These memorials, destroyed or missing, erase the often tragic history of Russian-Polish relations. From now on, the Russian power threatens to create new commemorations. “The Wagner group will undoubtedly blow up Rzeszów airport” (in the south-east of Poland); “We will shoot down all Polish cities with missiles,” shouts Russian national television broadcasts. And Vladimir Putin clarified: “The western territories of Poland are a gift from Stalin. We will remember it”.
“This speech is seen as a call to action, for the moment inside Russia, decrypts Alexander Morozov, a political scientist from Charles University in Prague. “This ideological tendency, which sweeps away the embarrassing memories for the Russians, with regard to neighboring peoples that the Kremlin wants on the other hand to pass for eternal Russophobes to defend its policy”.
This professor is worried about the future of the Katyn memorial. For years, this place, which recalls the execution of thousands of Polish officers by the USSR, has displayed the intention of the two countries to work together on their difficult common past. A month ago, the Polish flag was removed. The head of the memorial, Irina Velikanova, judged that it was “inappropriate” to leave this flag in place, “in the current circumstances”.
