In the yard of the Tuskulėnai Memorial Manor of the Lithuanian Population Genocide and Resistance Research Center (LGGRTC), the exhibition “Kabyliackaja hara – A place of memory and sadness” will be presented, dedicated to one of the Soviet mass killing sites in Gudia – Kabyliakai hill.
This exhibition aims to show that Gudija, as the Lithuanians called Belarus, suffered as much from Stalin’s repressions as Lithuania, according to the LGGRTC report.
The event will be attended by Belarusian historians, human rights defenders, and survivors of Stalinist repressions.
In 1982, during the construction of a railway in Belarus, human remains were found in Kabyliakai forest in Orsha district. A special state commission recognized that these were victims of mass executions carried out by the NKVD in 1930-1940. Soon after 1990, with the beginning of a new political era, the local authorities began to create a memorial in this place, marking the memory of the victims of Soviet repression, but in 1994, when Aliaksandr Lukashenka came to power, this topic was banned, the Kabyliakai Hill memorial was cared for only by Orsha activists for several decades.
In 2017, the initiative “Kabyliakai. “Orsha’s shot dead” began to collect the names and stories of the repressed, 3,725 names, dozens of stories of state terror, photographs and documents of the victims were collected on the website kobylaki.by.
“This exhibition reveals general information about Stalin’s repressions on the territory of the Byelorussian SSR, emphasizing the importance of Mount Kabyliakai and opens the door to the past, allowing us to look at unique documents and personal stories,” LGGRTC said in a statement.
In Belarus itself, Independence Day is not officially celebrated on March 25. On this day, the Belarusian Democratic Republic was declared in 1918, but it existed until the beginning of 1919, when the Bolsheviks took power in the country.
A. Lukashenko’s regime forbids celebrating this day in Belarus, it does not recognize it. In Belarus, the 3rd of July is celebrated as Independence Day, when in 1944 the Nazi German army withdrew from Minsk and it was occupied by the Soviet army.
