Solovetsky Stone

The Solovetsky Stone (Russian: Солове́цкий ка́мень, romanized: Solovetsky kamen’) is a monument on Lubyanka Square in Moscow to the victims of political repression. It is in close proximity to the Lubyanka Building, headquarters since 1918 of various Russian security services, from the Cheka to today's FSB. The monument is made up of a large boulder brought from the Solovetsky Islands in the far northern White Sea, where the first permanent camp of the Soviet penal system, the Solovki prison camp, was set up in 1923. The boulder rests on a granite plinth inscribed "To the victims of political repression". The monument was erected in 1990 to honor victims of political repression in the Soviet Union. Since then it has been the focus of annual and occasional gatherings and ceremonies: in particular, the Day in Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression from 1991 onwards on 30 October and, since 2007, "Restoring the Names" on the day before.

It has been the focus of tributes since 16 February 2024, when the Federal Penitentiary Service announced that activist and opposition leader Alexei Navalny had died at the prison in Yamalo-Nenets in Western Siberia.

Arkhangelsk to Moscow

The first "Solovki Stone" memorial was erected in northwest Russia's Arkhangelsk Region by the local Sovest (Conscience) society. This monument was created at a time when the debate about the future form of any memorial to the victims of Stalinism had still not been resolved. Subsequently many monuments erected across Russia to the victims of the Soviet regime emulated the same stark and abstract simplicity, also using large unshaped or rough-hewn boulders, for example the memorial in Nizhny Novgorod's Bugrovskoe cemetery.¹

According to the Russian NGO , the monument was erected on 30 October 1990 to commemorate a 1974 initiative by political prisoners to establish a "Day of Political Prisoners in the ." In 1991, the officially established 30 October as . It was on 30 October 2007 that Vladimir Putin visited the near Moscow and ten years later on the same date he and of the inaugurated the in the city itself.