Remembering Memorial

Mourners Gather To Remember Victims Of Repression

Every year on September 5 relatives and friends of victims of Stalin's murderous political repression gather at a modest plinth in the shadow of St Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress to commemorate the start of the Red Terror. LINDA JONES reports.

They came not only to remember their dead, but to remind the living of their loss. Some were decorated with medals, others with photos of loved-ones who had perished on the whim of a tyrant. Some cried openly, while many more were lost in a silent world of darkness and grief.
Natalia Konstantinova was nine years old when her father was shot. He had been arrested seven months earlier, accused of designing a bomb to assassinate Stalin.