On the website dedicated to The Night of the Executed Poets, there is a map showing the places where Belarusians are going to gather and honour the memory of the victims of Stalinist repressions.
The actions will reportedly take place in Odesa, Antwerp, Batumi, Warsaw, Vilnius, Kyiv, Oslo, Rome, San Francisco, Salvador and other places. To date, a total of 28 localities in Europe, North and South America have been mapped.
Until the year of 2021, a memorial event known as The Night Of Executed Poets took place in Kurapaty, a Stalin-era mass execution site near Minsk, on October 29, the unofficial day of remembrance of the Soviet repressions in Belarus.
On the night of 29-30 October 1937, Stalin’s secret police (NKVD) killed more than 100 representatives of Belarusian national elite. Belarusian poets, writers, scientists were killed one by one. Prose writer and publicist Yanka Nyomanski, who happened to be the oldest man of the executed, turned only 47 years old; among the youngest were poet and tralator Yuli Taubin (26), literary critic Pyotr Khatuliou (25), educator Ivan Zhylutski (25).
The execution on October 29-30 became the most tragic point of the wave of large-scale repressions against the Belarusian intellectual community. This wave which lasted from 1929 to 1938 aimed at destroying nationally oriented creators, teachers, officials, scientists; it affected more than 500 prominent cultural figures. Hundreds or even thousands of people were shot down, deported from Belarus, sent to labour camps.
Once historians appealed to the leadership of Belarus to make it the official day of remembrance of victims of political repressions, but the then KGB chairman turned the appeal down.
belsat.eu
