One of the places of burial for the executed and those who died in Kazan’s prisons between 1918 and the 1940s was the Arkhangelskoe cemetery. Their exact number is unknown.
In 1998, thanks to a proposal by the Memorial Society in Kazan, a memorial complex was created in a free area of the cemetery by the city’s administration. The complex includes a boulder bearing a commemorative plaque with the words, in both Russian and Tatar: “Never forget those shot during the years of political repression!” Nearby stand ten marble pillars with the names of 2,760 people executed between 1929 and 1942 (see The Great Terror in Kazan, 1937-1938).
A Book in Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression, The Republic of Tatarstan (18 vols. 2000-2007) included biographical entries on 52,000 individuals shot or sent to the Gulag.
The Memorial online database (2025) lists 101,127 victims in Tatarstan (BR 50,506).
5,706 were shot, many during the Great Terror (4,272): the Book of Remembrance also lists 89 shot in 1918, 466 in 1930-1, and 448 in 1941-3. Charges against 9,934 were dropped, 131 of them having died in custody. Almost 28,000 were sent to the camps and 4,742 were deported. The Book of Remembrance states that 5,225 of the victims died in captivity: the majority (over 3,000) were in the camps, some were deportees (105), others died without ever being charged (131), which leaves 1,070 unaccounted for.
The Republic’s police records list many more families and individuals (total 50,621), most of whom were expelled in 1930-1933, to the Chelyabinsk Region (20,000) in the Urals, to the Perm or Chita Regions (4,098), or who were born (7,003) in exile.
| Date | Nature of ceremonies | Organiser or responsible person | Participants | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
30 October
|
Remembrance Day for the Victims of Political Repression
|
Kazan City Administration
|
City officials, members of Kazan Memorial Society, participants from Muslim, Orthodox and Cathoic confessions;and school children
|
Annual event
|
| State of burials | Area | Boundaries |
|---|---|---|
|
Have not survived
|
not defined
|
not delineated
|
[ original texts and hyperlinks ]
A. Stepanov, A quota for execution: From the history of political repression in the Tatar ASSR during the “Yezhovshchina”, Kazan: Novoe znanie, 1999
Reply by Tatarstan ministry of internal affairs (No 5/3566 of 14 July 2004) to a formal enquiry from RIC Memorial (St Petersburg)
Reply by the deputy prime minister of Tatarstan (No 20-56/4267 of 29 April 2014) to a formal enquiry from RIC Memorial (St Petersburg)
Reply by the Republic of Tatarstan FSB (No 8/7617 of 21 June 2014) to a formal enquiry from RIC Memorial (St Petersburg)
