Returning the Names 2025

Born in Leningrad, Odesa, Minsk… Peasant, engineer, carpenter, no fixed occupation… 40 years old, 72, 19… Different people, birthplaces, professions and families.

All that is alike is the years of their death: in most cases, shot in 1937 and 1938. Lives trampled by the merciless Moloch of a totalitarian state. A state that not only hides its crimes but systematically destroys the memory of its victims.

Since Memorial was banned in Russia, “Returning the Names” has become a grassroots action of unprecedented reach, held by people in many parts of the world. As long as the names are read, the state of Cronus has not finally won.

For the third year, anti-war Russians in Turin gather at the end of October to join “Returning the Names”, Memorial’s annual action. The names are read in Russian and Italian, and sometimes family stories come up among them. Valentina read out the dates of birth and death and the sentence of her great-grandfather. Another participant read the names of her friend’s great-grandparents, which cannot yet be read aloud in Moscow.

Alongside the names and dates, messages from today’s political prisoners were read: anti-war Russians who remember the tradition of this day and joined it in this way.

Lyudmila Razumova named the political prisoner writer who matters most to her: Varlam Shalamov. A personal recollection by Andrei Trofimov of the unveiling of the Solovetsky Stone in Moscow was read out; that is where the lists of the repressed began to be read in 1990. Poems by Daniil Krinari in memory of his repressed Polish great-grandfather were also heard.

We will keep in touch with the people for whom principles and beliefs have proved more important than personal freedom and safety. And every year at the end of October we will gather to read the names, to return them to history, in the hope that Memorial’s action will one day return to the Solovetsky Stone, and that the notion of a political prisoner will become a subject of study rather than today’s reality.

🤝 Thanks to our friends at the Adelaide Aglietta Radical Association for their unfailing support.

📣 We continue our activism in Turin and welcome everyone who shares our position.

Video

Filmed by Ekaterina Tarasenko

Photos

By Ekaterina Tarasenko, E.A. and Tatiana Litvinova

The full photo and video archive is here.