The Stone of Sorrow, a memorial to victims of Soviet political repression, was dismantled at night under the official explanation that a former NKVD garage had to be protected — part of the infrastructure associated with the “black vans” of the Great Terror.
The official version invites us to discuss the garage. But the way the dismantling was carried out forces a different discussion: the disappearance of public memory. The garage is the explanation. Memory is the object of action.
Not the Garage, but Memory
On the night of April 19, 2026, the Stone of Sorrow (Камень скорби) memorial in the western Siberian city of Tomsk, Russia — a public monument dedicated to the victims of political repression — was dismantled.
The official explanation pointed to a garage, a slope, and an alleged risk of collapse. That explanation matters. But it is not enough. The issue is not only whether a technical risk existed. It is why a public site of memory was removed from the city at night, under conditions of limited visibility, restricted access, and little immediate public accountability.
The garage matters, too — but not in the way the official version suggests. This was not an ordinary garage. It was the garage of the former Tomsk city department of the NKVD, part of the operational infrastructure associated with the “black vans” used to transport arrested people during the years of Soviet terror. The structure still exists. It remains in use today, under the authority of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation and administered by the Tomsk police.
That continuity is not incidental. A memorial to the victims of political repression was removed in the name of protecting an infrastructural remnant historically connected to the machinery of repression the memorial was meant to recall. The garage may explain the administrative language through which the action was justified. It does not explain the form the action took.
It does not explain the night. Or the restricted access. Or the limits placed on public documentation. And it does not explain why a site of memory was treated not as a civic space requiring public accountability, but as an object to be managed, contained, and removed.
The garage was the explanation. Memory was the object of action.
What Was Actually Removed
What was removed in Tomsk was not merely a stone. It was not simply an element of urban landscaping. The dismantling affected the central Stone of Sorrow memorial, the surrounding national commemorative markers, and the larger memorial landscape dedicated to communities subjected to Soviet political repression.
Over time, the site had accumulated meaning. It included memorial signs dedicated to repressed peoples and national communities. It functioned as a place of civic ceremony, public remembrance, and historical witness. It was also connected to the work of Memorial — the organization that made a major contribution to the study and public recognition of political repression in the Soviet Union, and which has since been banned in the Russian Federation and designated an extremist organization.
Places like this are not defined only by their material form. A memorial site is also a practice. People gather there. They bring flowers. They speak names. They hold commemorative events. They return.
Through these repeated acts, a physical object becomes part of the civic and symbolic fabric of a city.
The demolition, then, did not affect only a monument. It interrupted a public memory infrastructure. It removed from the urban landscape a site through which the city could acknowledge political violence, historical responsibility, and the lives of those destroyed by state repression.
What was dismantled was not only an object of urban maintenance. What was dismantled was a place of public memory.
The Garage as a Frame
The garage cannot be ignored. It belongs to the official explanation, to the spatial setting, and to the administrative language through which the dismantling was justified.
But it cannot be allowed to become the whole field of discussion.
The official version invites the public to speak in technical terms: a garage, a slope, a possible collapse, a safety concern, an emergency procedure. Inside that frame, the question becomes narrow: Did a technical risk exist, and did the authorities act appropriately in response?
The procedure itself points beyond that frame. A purely technical emergency does not explain why the removal took place at night. It does not explain restricted access. It does not explain the reported limits on documentation. It does not explain the silence that followed, the removal of public comments, or the absence of a clear public account of where the memorial was taken and under what conditions it is being held.
The garage was important. But it was secondary. It functioned as a reason, a pretext, and an administrative mechanism. It translated a political and memorial question into the language of municipal safety.
That translation is itself part of the event.
The technical frame explains the stated reason, but it does not explain the closed, police-controlled regime of information management through which the memorial was removed.
What a Public Procedure Would Have Required
If the dismantling of the Stone of Sorrow was truly an emergency safety measure, the procedure should have been organized around public trust. A city does not protect a memorial by removing it in silence. It protects it by documenting the necessity, explaining the risk, naming the responsible institutions, and showing the public that the object is being preserved — not erased.
That would have required prior public notice. Residents should have been told what danger had been identified, which structure was at risk, how that risk affected the memorial site, and why removal was considered necessary. A competent public commission should have been named — engineers, municipal officials, preservation specialists, and, ideally, representatives of civic and memorial communities.
The city should also have published the documents behind the decision — inspection reports, emergency assessments, the formal act authorizing the work, and a clear explanation of the legal basis for dismantling the memorial. Before any removal, the full memorial complex should have been photographed, inventoried, and publicly documented: the central Stone of Sorrow, the national commemorative markers, the surrounding memorial landscape.
The dismantling itself should have taken place in daylight. Journalists should have been allowed to observe. Civic observers should have been allowed to document. Afterward, the authorities should have stated clearly where the memorial was taken, who is responsible for its preservation, what condition it is in, and when it is expected to return. A timeline for emergency work, restoration, or reinstallation should have been made public.
None of this would have weakened the official safety argument. It would have strengthened it.
Public procedure is what distinguishes preservation from disappearance. The absence of such a procedure suggests that the city was not dealing simply with an emergency object, but with an inconvenient site of memory.
What Happened Instead
What happened in Tomsk did not resemble an open emergency preservation procedure. The dismantling was carried out at night, from Saturday into Sunday — the moment when public attention was lowest and ordinary civic oversight was least likely to be present.
Access to the area was restricted. According to eyewitness accounts and media reports, attempts to document the process were limited or obstructed. The removal was reportedly accompanied by an operational presence from the Tomsk regional branch of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). After the memorial had been taken away, the site remained under police control.
The pattern continued after the physical removal. Citizens who came to photograph the site reportedly had their personal information recorded by the police. Questions and comments in official municipal channels were removed. The city administration first published an explanation pointing to the garage, then removed that statement from its official channels. For several days, silence followed. Only later, in response to an inquiry from a local Tomsk media outlet, did the administration confirm the same explanation, again citing the garage. During that time, it still did not provide a full public account: where the memorial had been taken, what condition it was in, who was responsible for its preservation, or when — and whether — it would be restored.
The sequence matters. Not only what was explained, but how it was done.
A public safety measure normally seeks visibility, documentation, and trust. Here, the process produced the opposite: limited visibility, controlled access, uncertainty, and a near-total silence — what in Russian might be called “гробовое молчание.”
The mode of execution became more revealing than the official explanation. The regime of execution — not the language of safety — shows the real character of the event. The event did not literally repeat the Great Terror. But in its grammar — night, restricted access, operational control, and removal from public space — it came uncomfortably close to the methods associated with NKVD practice.
When Documentation Became Suspicious
The removal of the memorial was accompanied by a secondary process: the monitoring of those who tried to register its absence.
The distinction matters. After the Stone of Sorrow had already been dismantled, the site itself became an object of public attention. People came not to interfere with work, but to see what had happened. To photograph the empty space. To document the disappearance of a public memorial from the city.
Yet, according to reported accounts, the act of documentation itself became subject to administrative attention. Citizens photographing the site were reportedly approached by police officers, and their personal information was recorded. Taking a photograph — a basic civic and journalistic act — was treated not as ordinary public observation, but as something requiring supervision.
This was not simply the control of territory. It was the control of visibility. The question was no longer only whether the memorial had been removed, but whether its removal could be openly registered, circulated, and remembered.
The authorities, in other words, were not only managing access to a physical site. They were managing the public visibility of what had happened there.
Silence as Part of the Event
The silence that followed the dismantling was not separate from the event. It became part of it.
If the removal of the Stone of Sorrow had been an ordinary emergency procedure, the city administration could have explained the sequence clearly: what was removed, where it was taken, who was responsible for its preservation, what condition it was in, and when the public could expect restoration or further action.
Instead, the information that followed was fragmented, delayed, and incomplete.
The absence of a full public account produced its own meaning. There were no widely available images showing the condition of the removed memorial in storage. No clear timetable for restoration or reinstallation. No detailed public report explaining the decision-making process, the responsible officials, or the legal and technical basis for the work. According to public accounts, questions and comments in municipal channels were removed rather than answered.
Administrative silence became a continuation of the dismantling by other means. The memorial was removed from the square. Then the public explanation of its removal was also withheld from view.
When a monument is removed publicly, society sees a procedure.
When a monument is removed at night and then surrounded by silence, society sees something else: disappearance.
Beyond a Municipal Matter
The dismantling of the Stone of Sorrow was not only a local municipal event.
The memorial site belonged to a broader landscape of remembrance — one that extended beyond Tomsk, and beyond Russia itself.
Alongside the central Stone of Sorrow, the site included national commemorative markers dedicated to repressed communities: Kalmyks, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians. These were not decorative additions. They connected the Tomsk memorial landscape to the histories of peoples and national communities subjected to Soviet political repression.
The reaction, therefore, did not remain local. The embassies of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland issued a joint statement in response to the dismantling. Their intervention made clear that the site was not merely an object of urban maintenance or municipal landscaping. It was a place of memory with international significance.
The city administration was not, then, dealing simply with a local monument. It intervened in a memorial space recognized and valued beyond the city itself — a space connected to the historical memory of several nations and communities.
This international dimension changes the meaning of the event. What may have been presented as a technical measure became, in effect, an action affecting a shared landscape of memory.
Memorial Under Pressure
The Stone of Sorrow was also connected to the civic work of Memorial, the organization that played a central role in documenting Soviet political repression and preserving public memory of its victims. In Tomsk, as elsewhere in Russia, Memorial helped create a language, a practice, and an institutional framework through which the history of repression could be publicly acknowledged.
The context is important.
Memorial has since been banned in the Russian Federation and designated by Russian authorities as an extremist organization. Formally, this does not, by itself, establish a direct causal link between that designation and the dismantling of the Tomsk memorial. Symbolically and practically, however, the event appears to follow the same trajectory: institutions, practices, and spaces associated with the memory of political repression have become increasingly vulnerable.
The memorial site was not only a physical location. It was part of a civic infrastructure of remembrance: a place shaped by public initiative, historical research, commemorative practice, and the moral work of naming victims and preserving memory.
When such a site is removed, the action affects more than stone and landscape. It affects the civic structures that made remembrance possible.
Even if the dismantling was formally explained as a response to an emergency risk, it took place in a context where the institutions of memory themselves had already been placed under pressure.
This context cannot be ignored.
Memory as a Civic Institution
The Stone of Sorrow was not merely a monument. It functioned as a civic institution of memory within the urban environment of Tomsk.
The distinction is essential. A monument is not only the material object placed in a square. It is also the public practice that forms around it: ceremonies, anniversaries, flowers, names, gatherings, silence, grief, speech, and return.
Over time, these practices transform stone into institution. They make a place into a public structure through which a city remembers.
The dismantling of the Stone of Sorrow, therefore, cannot be understood only as the physical relocation of an object. It was the disabling — temporary or permanent — of a public site where the city could remember the victims of political repression, gather around their memory, bear witness, and speak about state violence.
This is where the garage frame fails. The deeper question is not simply why a technical risk was cited. It is who has the authority to switch off a public site of memory — and under what conditions such an action can be carried out without open public accountability.
What was removed was not only stone.
What was interrupted was a civic function.
Tomsk as a Procedure
Tomsk should not be treated as an isolated exception. It should be read as a model.
If, in one Russian city, a technical risk can be cited as the reason for removing a memorial to the victims of political repression; if that removal can be carried out at night; if access can be restricted, documentation monitored, public questions left unanswered, and no full public account provided — then the significance of the event extends far beyond a single square.
The issue is not only what happened in Tomsk. The issue is that Tomsk revealed a possible mechanism. A memorial can be reframed as a safety problem. A site of memory can be translated into the language of municipal risk. A public place can be removed through procedure, while the public is left with uncertainty instead of explanation.
This is why Tomsk matters beyond itself. Across the country, there are memorials, plaques, stones, and local sites connected to the memory of political repression. Many of them are not large state monuments. They are fragile civic markers — dependent on local communities, historical memory, and the willingness of authorities to tolerate public remembrance.
Tomsk showed not only an event.
It showed a procedure.
And once a procedure has been demonstrated, it can be repeated.
The Question of Public Responsibility
The question of the garage remains important. But it is not the central question.
The real question is why a site of memory was removed from the city through a procedure that did not correspond to the public logic of preservation, protection, and responsibility. If this was about safety, why was there so little openness? If this was about preservation, why was there so little accountability? If this was a temporary emergency measure, why were no clear timelines, guarantees, or public mechanisms of return presented?
A city that removes a memorial dedicated to the victims of political repression assumes a special burden of explanation. It must show not only why the action was necessary, but how memory is being protected while the object is displaced. Without that explanation, the official language of safety cannot account for the political and symbolic meaning of what occurred.
The issue, then, cannot be reduced to a technical object, a slope, or a garage. What happened in Tomsk concerns the public conditions under which memory is allowed to exist, to be seen, to be gathered around, and to be defended.
What was dismantled was not only the Stone of Sorrow.
In Tomsk, the public procedure of memory itself was dismantled.
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This work is produced as part of Denis Karagodin’s independent research and writing.
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