About 100 people, including a local government official, gathered for the memorial at the Levashovsky Cemetery, said Viktor Vitko, a spokesman and Religious Liberty Director for the church’s Moscow-based Euro-Asia Division.
In remarks published by the Adventist News Network (ANN), Vitko said 40,000 people were secretly executed in St. Petersburg between 1937 and 1938 as part of what locals described as Stalin’s "Political Purge" campaign. Five of the 140 Adventist victims have now been identified, he added.
The cemetery remained classified by the Committee for State Security (KGB) until 1989, Vitko was quoted as saying. "Hundreds of people were buried here," confirmed Nikolay Smagin, pastor of the Adventist Church in St. Petersburg, during opening remarks. "Today we know just some names: Nikolay Arefiev, Grigory Kichaev, Teodor Kotuhov, Adam Pletser and Vladimir Teppone."
LONG OVERDUE
An associate professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Columbia Union College near Washington DC reportedly said such a monument was long overdue. "But before 1992 there was no possibility for Adventists or any religious group to build a monument in public, let alone get permission," Michael M. Kulakov Jr. told ANN.
The professor’s father, Michael P. Kulakov, once expelled to Siberia, was apparently one of many Adventists who secretly continued the Adventist Church’s work in Russia during Communist rule. The younger Kulakov recalled finding secret compartments as a child in his father’s house in Kazakhstan, one even hiding a 1929 edition of the Adventist Church’s Bible study guide. In 1990 the elder Kulakov became the first president of the church’s newly formed Euro-Asia Division based in Moscow.
The new monument in Levashovsky is significant, Kulakov said, because many younger Russians are far removed from the country’s communist past. "They have no experiential knowledge of the degree of repression and suffering that Stalin’s dictatorship brought to Russia," he told ANN.
Between 1937 and 1938, more than 3000 church members were arrested for their participation in church activities, Vitko said. There are now about 45,000 Adventists worshiping in some 600 churches in Russia, according to church estimates.
