Museum opens on Day of Remembrance of victims of Stalinist repressions
On this very day, fourteen years ago the country proclaimed it to be an official date of commemoration of the victims of political repression. In 1993, Kazakh government adopted a law on rehabilitation of those who suffered political violence under the totalitarian Soviet regime, the press service of the Kazakh MFA reports.
Senior government officials, representatives of the Diplomatic Corps, ethnic and cultural associations, political parties, NGOs and youth organizations, victims of Stalinist repressions, as well as their relatives who currently live in Kazakhstan and Russia attended a solemn opening ceremony, dedicated to the Memorial Day of Victims of Political Repression and the 20th anniversary of Independence of Kazakhstan.
Speaking at the official opening ceremony in Dolinka, Deputy Chairman of the Assembly of Peoples of Kazakhstan Yeraly Tugzhanov read out the welcome address by President Nursultan Nazarbayev to the participants of the meeting: "The memory of millions of people of different ethnicities and religious beliefs, who suffered from the totalitarian system, were blameless convicted of dissidence, died in Gulag labour camps and were mercilessly sent away from their homeland, for us, the citizens of free and independent Kazakhstan, has always been and will be sacred. And we are working hard for the sake of the justice".
"Over the years of independence there have been published fourteen "Books of Memory", which contain the information on almost 146,000 repressed compatriots. In compliance with the legislation of our country more than 340,000 illegally repressed citizens were rehabilitated. All of this helps us to realise that the bitter lessons of the past oblige us to exert every effort to prevent the recurrence of such a tragedy in the modern and future history of the mankind", President Nazarbayev stated in his address.
Vice Minister of Culture and Information Gaziz Telebayev, Chairman of the Parliament of the Russian Federaion's Chechen Republic Dukuvakh Abdurakhmanov, prominent researcher of Stalinist repressions Professor Mambet Kulzhabayuly, President of the Woman's Club "Astana-Baiterek" Tamara Lavrenenko, along with the descendants of the repressed people addressed the guests and participants who gathered in front of the new museum to pay tribute to the victims of this sad chapter in the history of Kazakhstan.
The ceremony continued with a guided tour of the museum providing the visitors a chance to observe conditions the prisoners lived in, wax figures of the repressed and the guards, cells, detention and interrogation tools which are now presented to restore the atmosphere of the past.
Following the tour of the museum and the exhibition, a flower-laying ceremony at Spassky Memorial Complex, 30 kilometres south of Qaraghandy, and a conference took place in the Buketov Qaraghandy State University, both dedicated to the Day of Memory of Victims of Political Repression.
KarLag, which stands for Karaganda (Qaraghandy) Lager (or Camp in Russian), was part of the infamous system of labour camps of the GULAG system instituted in the 1930s-1950s by the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin to prosecute dissidents and the so-called "enemies of the state" as well as to provide cheap labour force. The tragedy of GULAG was immortalised in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago as well as many other literary works.