In 1937-1940, executions and burials of those executed in Cheboksary, the capital of Chuvashia, during and after the Great Terror, took place near the vegetable storage facilities next to the gullies on Kazanskaya and Cheboksary Streets, and also in the courtyard of the former police headquarters on Yaroslavskaya Street.
In 1956, the remains of those executed were reburied in cemetery No 1 (42a Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street). The cemetery was closed in 1965. In 1991 a memorial was placed on the reburial site thanks to the city authorities who proposed and paid for the project. The memorial is a wall of concrete blocks pierced by a star-shaped hole set against metal bars: next to it stands a red granite pillar bearing the words, “To the victims of political repression, 1930s to 1950s”.
Chuvashia. A Book in Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression (3 vols. 2009-2017) contains 7,756 biographical entries on those sentenced to death or sent to the Gulag.
Тhe Memorial online database (2025) lists 17,949 victims in Chuvashia (BR 12,765).
1,117 were shot, many during the Great Terror. Cases against 2,571 other individuals were closed (93 of them died in captivity) and a few were acquitted in court (325). 8,000 were sent to the camps. and over 5,000 were deported, half to the Sverdlovsk Region. Police records add another 5,184 individuals, most born in Chuvashia (4,837) who were deported in the early 1930s to the Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk and Kirovsk Regions.
| State of burials | Area | Boundaries |
|---|---|---|
|
Site of reburial is well preserved
|
4 sq m
|
not delineated
|
[ Original texts & hyperlinks ]
Reply from the Cheboksary City Administration (No 4115 of 15 April 2014) to a formal enquiry by RIC Memorial (St Petersburg)
