Amsterdam 2017 – Viktor Fyodorovich Horodchinsky

Poet, arrested at age 15, executed in Solovetski in 1937.

Exhibition about the Gulags in the Verzetsmuseum

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote the following in his Gulag Archipelago:

“Thus many were shot — thousands at first, then hundreds of thousands. We divide, we multiply, we
sigh, we curse. But still and all, these are just numbers. They overwhelm the mind and then are easily
forgotten. And if someday the relatives of those who had been shot were to send one publisher
photographs of their executed kin, and an album of those photographs were to be published in
several volumes, then just by leafing through them and looking into the extinguished eyes we would
learn much that would be valuable for the rest of our lives. Such read- ing, almost without words,
would leave a deep mark on our hearts for all eternity.

In one household I am familiar with, where some former zeks live, the following ceremony takes
place: On March 5, the day of the death of the Head Murderer, they spread out on the table all the
photographs of those who were shot and those who died in camps that they have been able to
collect — several dozen of them. And throughout the day solemnity reigns in the apartment —
somewhat like that of a church, somewhat like that of a museum. There is funeral music. Friends
come to visit, to look at the photographs, to keep silent, to listen, to talk softly together. And then
they leave without saying good-bye.

And that is how it ought to be everywhere. At least these deaths would have left a small scar on our
hearts.

So that they should not have died in vain!

And I, too, have a few such chance photographs. Look at these at least:
Viktor Petrovich Pokrovsky — shot in Moscow in 1918.
Aleksandr Shtrobinder, a student — shot in Petrograd in 1918.
Vasily Ivanovich Anichkov — shot in the Lubyanka in 1927.
Aleksandr Andreyevich Svechin, a professor of the General Staff — shot in 1935.
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Reformatsky, an agronomist — shot in Orel in 1938.
Yelizaveta Yevgenyevna Anichkova — shot in a camp on the Yenisei in 1942.”