A Last Address memorial plaque near the corner of Poltava Street and Nevsky Prospect in Petersburg, October 11, 2018. Photo by the Russian Reader
This coming Sunday, January 13, 2019, Last Address in Petersburg and relatives of three men executed during the Great Terror will install memorial plaques on the Petrograd Side and Vasilyevsky Island.
At 12 p.m., a plaque will be hung at Kronverskaya Street 29/37 in memory of Andrei Aro. Aro taught at the Communist University of Ethnic Minorities of the West until 1937. When he was arrested in April 1938, he was working as a welder in the workshop of the district housing management company. He was sentenced to death by a so-called Dvoika [a commission of the NKVD and Soviet Prosecutor’s Office] and shot on August 3, 1938. He was 48 years old.
At 12:45 p.m., a third plaque will be installed on Building 7, Kamennoostrovsky Prospect 64. Until his arrest on July 22, 1937, it was the home of Shahno Krasilshchik, a dispatcher at Furniture Factory No. 162, located nearby. Krasilshchik was shot on November 24, 1937. 719 people were executed in Leningrad that day.
At 1:30 p..m., a plaque will be erected at Bolshoi Prospect 72 in memory of Boleslav Misnik, a design engineer who worked for fourteen years at the Baltic Plant. He was shot on October 6, 1937. His wife was exiled from Leningrad, while his son and daughter were left in the care of their grandfather.
A Finn, a Belarusian Jew, and Pole: all three men were shot after they had been sentenced by an extrajudicial authority, a joint commission of the NKVD and Soviet Prosecutor’s Office. Victims of the Great Terror’s ethnic purges [“national operations”], they were subsequently rehabilitated.
UPDATE (January 8, 2019). In order to accommodate the number of relatives wishing to attend, the installation of the plaque commemorating Boleslav Misnik has been postponed to a later date TBA.
Translated by the Russian Reader
The Russian Reader 