Last Address

The first memorial signs of “Last Address” project were installed in Moscow on Human Rights Day, 10 December 2014.[7] Some of the signs were made in response to applications of the residents of houses where repressed people had lived.

The next batch of signs was installed in February–March 2015. By January 2015, over 500 applications for the installation of memorial sign had been submitted. Since 2016, the installation of memorial signs is being performed usually 2 times per month, see for example a story of a sign installation: Last Address: Nikolai Yushkevich (Russian Reader, May 9, 2018).

The first 12 memorial signs on the houses of Saint Petersburg were installed on 21–22 March 2015;[13] 80 more applications were submitted to St. Petersburg “Memorial” office. At the initiative of Anna Akhmatova Literary and Memorial Museum, two plaques were installed on the wall of the “Fountain House” commemorating the poet’s civil partner, art historian Nikolay Punin, and his daughter’s husband, worker Genrikh Kaminsky.

In two cases, the applicant was a resident of the house who decided to install plaques for all those for whom that house had been a last address. These are the houses at Pushkinskaya ulitsa 19 (three signs) and Fontanka Embankment 129 (five signs). The installation of the memorial sign at Ulitsa Rubinshteina 19 was attended by a relative of the repressed person who came from Kiev specifically for that purpose. Sergey Parkhomenko says that the emotional reaction is easy to understand: “Last Address” is often the only place where the name of the deceased is commemorated, because most of those repressed were buried in mass graves.

The second batch of memorial signs installed on six houses on 25–26 July 2015 included such names as artist B. Malakhovsky, outstanding literary scholar G. Gukovsky, as well as scientists, engineers, and people who were not famous or outstanding in any way, such as the family Belenkiye-Bodganovy (an accountant and a housewife) arrested as “Polish spies.”

“Last Address” was launched in Perm in February 2014.[14] The first four plaques were installed on 10 August 2015. The project founder Serguei Parkhomenko came from Moscow to Perm; in an interview to Zvezda magazine he talked about the ways to launch an initiative group, what the cases of the repressed were telling us and whether it was necessary or advisable to install signs commemorating the organizers of repressions.

The first village with a “Last Address” sign was the village Kupros of Yusvinsky District, Komi-Permyak Okrug. The memorial sign was installed on 11 August 2015 on the façade of the house that was the last residential address of peasant Valentin Startsev, declared by investigators “an active participant of the liquidated counterrevolutionary insurgent organization.” Investigators claimed that Startsev was “conducting counterrevolutionary defeatist agitation among kolkhoz members, trying to prove the inevitability of the fall of Soviet power,” “praising the old Tsarist regime and proving unprofitability of kolkhozes”; as a result, he was sentenced to capital punishment in the form of execution by a firing squad.

The first commemorative sign in Taganrog was installed on 31 May 2015. The ceremony was attended by project founder Serguei Parkhomenko, the deputy of Oblast Duma Oleg Kobyakov, president of the Council of the regional branch of the Russian National Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments Alexander Kozhin, residents of neighboring houses and numerous journalists.