Created to ensure the names of those executed by the communist authorities were not forgotten, these public acts of memorial have been taking place since 2007, coordinated by international human rights organisation Memorial.
For the fifth year in a row, the Moscow authorities banned the ceremony from taking place at the Solovetsky Stone, a slab of granite transported from the site of the Soviet government’s first prison camp in Russia’s far north that now stands outside the notorious Lubyanka prison in central Moscow. While officially the event was cancelled due to Covid-19 restrictions, the fact that the authorities also went to the trouble of blocking the event’s website suggests that there may have been far more behind the move.