Last Address

Last Address

(Translation: Here was the home, where Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam lived. Poet. Born in 1891. Arrested on June 16, 1934. Died on December 27, 1938 in a Gulag near Vladivostok. Rehabilitated in 1956.)

Last Address (Russian: Последний адрес) is a small Memorial Plaque that pays tribute to the Millions of Innocent Men, Women and Children arrested, deported and/or murdered by Stalin and the Soviet Communists from 1917-1991.)

It was founded by Journalist Sergey Parkhomenko.

Last Address draws inspiration from the Stolpersteine ("Stumbling Stones") Initiative, which was created in 1992 to memorialize Holocaust Victims in Europe.

Just as Stolpersteine involves placing small Brass Plaques in the pavement outside the Victims’ last chosen Residences, Last Address installs commemorative Plaques on the buildings where the Soviet Regime's Victims last lived before their arrest.

These Plaques bear the Names, Professions and Birth Dates as well as the Date of their Arrest, Execution or Death in the Gulag.

The Plaques are funded by Private Donations and their installation often involves a small ceremony attended by Relatives and Activists.

Last Address has installed more than 2,500 Plaques in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other Russian Cities.

Stolpersteine installed the 100,000th Stolperstein on May 26, 2023.

 

Number of Victims by the Soviet Communists (1917-1991):

The Red Terror (1917 to 1922): 3,284,000 Men, Women and Children murdered.

The New Economic Period (1923-1928): 2,200,000 Men, Women and Children murdered.

Collectivization (1928-1935): 14,400,000 Men, Women and Children murdered.

Forced Psychiatry Treatments Part 1 (1921-1955): 1,802 Men and Women murdered.

The Great Purge (1936-1938): 4,345,000 Men, Women and Children murdered.

Holodomor Man-Made Famine (1932-1933): 3,500,000 Men, Women and Children murdered.

Katyn Massacre (1940): 22,000 Poles murdered.

Forced Population Transfers (1930-1952): 389,521 Kulaks murdered, 400,000 Chechens murdered, 90,000 Poles murdered, 40,000 Soviet Koreans murdered, 5,400 Estonians murdered, 17,400 Latvians murdered, 28,000 Lithuanians murdered, 18,800 Finns murdered, 20,000 Hungarians murdered, 19,000 Karachais murdered, 228,800 Soviet Germans murdered, 360,000 non-Soviet Germans murdered, 16,000 Kalmyks murdered, 23,000 Ingush murdered, 11,000 Balkars murdered, 195,471 Crimean Tatars murdered, 50,000 Meskhetian Turks murdered.

Gulags (1919-1953): 1.7 Million died as a direct result of their detention (doesn’t include those who died from starvation, the extreme cold, forced labor, etc.)

 

Forced Psychiatry Treatments Part 2 (1964-1989): Out of the 10,347 officially punished people 96% of them were murdered through extreme usage of dangerous chemicals and medicines.

Rehabilitation:

32 million Men, Women and Children were officially Rehabilitated by the Soviet Government from 1953-1964.

From 1988-1991 different Soviet Republics (like the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republics in April 1991) of the Soviet Union created different Political Rehabilitation Laws.

In 1993, the Russian Federation created their first Rehabilitation Law.

From 1993 to 2004, the Russian Prosecutor's Office 634,165 Men, Women and Children were Rehabilitated.

In 2004 the Russian Government stopped announcing official Legal Rehabilitation numbers. That is when President Putin moved away from blaming Stalin and the USSR to praising, promoting and rehabilitating Stalin and the USSR.

Thousands of Russian Men, Women and Children are currently being Purged (arrested, tortured, murdered or sent to Forced Labor Penal Colonies for 15 years in Putin’s Russia.

The need for Last Address Plaques in Russia grows every day.