DO you have a favourite piece of work? Perhaps you're proud of the way you persuaded your interviewee to "open up," are chuffed at the scale of the exclusive, or just fondly remember the time you wrote it.
My most fondly remembered feature was a piece for the St Petersburg Press, a paper I joined in 1994 and left exactly a year later. It's now the St Petersburg Times
I'm posting it here as it's not online anywhere else and I would like to be able to show people. You can read it, if you would like, after the cut.
Remembering Memorial: Mourners Gather To Remember Victims Of Repression
Every year on September 5 relatives and friends of victims of Stalin's murderous political repression gather at a modest plinth in the shadow of St Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress to commemorate the start of the Red Terror. LINDA JONES reports.
They came not only to remember their dead, but to remind the living of their loss.
Some were decorated with medals, others with photos of loved-ones who had perished on the whim of a tyrant. Some cried openly, while many more were lost in a silent world of darkness and grief.
Natalia Konstantinova was nine years old when her father was shot. He had been arrested seven months earlier, accused of designing a bomb to assassinate Stalin.
But, confides Natalia, now 67, her father's fate remained a painful mystery for half a century. She was repeatedly told he had suffered a heart attack when she demanded answers.
In 1989 officials admitted he was shot. But to this day Alexander Konstantinov's daughter has not been told where he was buried. She is sure it was in his home city of Leningrad.
"I came here because all my life has been connected with the terrible events that took place in our country. My father was one of Russia's leading specialists in television technology. "He was the first person in this country to develop the electronic tube. But, as I got to know from the KGB documents 50 years later, they never asked him about his work.
"It hurts me greatly that they killed him without knowing his great talent or putting it to some use.
"He was accused of preparing a device to assassinate Stalin. He was among a group of outstanding Leningraders, from the university, geological and astronomy institutes. All of them were very young, aged 35 to 40, my father was 41.
"My father was shot on May 26, 1937. On September 1 that year my mother was arrested and spent eight years in Magadan, in the furthest corner of Russia as a member a traitor's family.
"My grandmother, my sister and I, who were aged 10 and 12, were sent into exile in the Orenburg Region.
My sister and I stayed there seven years, my grandmother, nine.
"Up to now I have learned the date my father was shot but they have never told me his place of burial. I have read the documents. They say there are no documents about where he was shot or buried. "My father was born here, christened here and worked here. Leningrad was his home. All his life was connected with the city. I know he died and was buried here too.
"It is important that we do not forget. But it is also important that we repent and think about the future."
Natalia was just one face in the 100-strong crowd at Troitskaya Square, where a simple rectangular marble stone was installed five years ago to honour Stalin's victims.
Today it is flanked by a blue banner bearing the name "Memorial." Enraged old men are shouting red-faced through a megaphone about the horrors of the past and the dangers of the future. Memorial is a charity, set up six years ago, with Andrei Sakharov at the forefront, to create a living testament to the dead.
Natalia explains the Red Terror is the name given to mass repression which began in the days of Lenin. Twenty years later came the Great Terror, of which Alexander Konstantinov was a victim. It was also known as Yezhovshchina, and lasted from 1937 until December, 1938. Its Russian name comes from Nikolai Yezhov, the then head of the secret police.
Memorial spokesman Benjamin Iofe says its members are getting younger.
"There are people here who weren't even born when it all happened," he says.
At least a million of the eight million people arrested during the dark days of the purges, are thought to have been executed. And according to Mr Iofe, tens of thousands more innocent people were thrown into Stalin's labor camps - countless victims never returned.
"We come here every year, we discuss the past and talk about the years to come. We will never forget what happened and must strive to make sure it doesn't happen again."
I loved this piece Linda, really moving. Some of my favourite work is for the Western Daily Press.
Posted by: Pem | May 12, 2007 at 08:34 AM