Final Note: On the Removal of the Stone of Sorrow

I woke up to a city in which, overnight, the Stone of Sorrow — a memorial to the victims of political repression — had been dismantled. There was little to do at that point except begin thinking through what had happened.

I framed the situation as a case study for my ongoing KARAGODIN^® Investigation White Paper, set a structure for interpretation, wrote what I felt needed to be said, and then went to the site to document what remained — or, more precisely, what no longer did.

At the location, I was stopped by the police. My identification was recorded. That was the moment the situation shifted. I was no longer just observing the removal of the memorial. In a limited but tangible way, I had become part of the same structure surrounding it — a witness not only in my own text, but in administrative records as well.

What followed was a series of texts.

I wrote The Black Vans Return as an attempt to describe the event itself. In Russian, I published fragments under the title Infrastructure of Responsibility. From there, I moved outward, tracing a broader pattern: first suggesting that what happened in Tomsk might not remain isolated, and then developing that line of thought into a wider reflection in Memory Wars: Mirroring Dynamics Between Russia and Europe.

Three days before these events, I had published a project statement titled Node Above the Archive. In it, I argued for the development of civic institutions in the digital domain — forms of memory and presence that cannot be physically dismantled or removed. What happened in Tomsk, unfolding almost immediately afterward, seemed to echo that proposition in an unintended but striking way.

Seen from this perspective, this was not entirely unexpected.

Before all of this, I had written a longer analytical piece titled Prohibiting What Has Already Become Part of the State. In it, I argued that the state was beginning to prohibit something that had already become embedded within its own structure. The events in Tomsk appeared to confirm that trajectory. What had once been integrated into the symbolic and institutional fabric of the state began to be removed from within it.

Tomsk is only one case. What follows, and at what scale, remains formally uncertain — yet the broader trajectory is increasingly difficult to ignore.

Within the limits of what was possible, I observed, documented, and wrote.

That is what I could do.

And that is what I have done.

Update — April 25, 2026

After publishing this note, I added another analytical text: To Save the NKVD Garage, Tomsk Removed a Memorial. It develops the procedural dimension of the same event. The official explanation invited the public to discuss a garage, a slope, and a safety risk. But the way the dismantling was carried out points to a different question: how a public site of memory was removed through a closed, police-controlled, and poorly explained procedure.

In that sense, the later text extends the argument made here. It does not replace the witness account; it clarifies the mechanism. The garage was the explanation. Memory was the object of action.

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