The work is a video showing the process of collecting the name of my great-uncle Danil. I collected his name by transferring letters from the monument to the victims of political repressions in Perm to paper with charcoal.
The idea of the work was born when I found the case of my great-uncle Shchigalev Danila Antonovich in 2018 in the Perm State Archive.
He is a brother of my grandfather Ivan.
Shchigalev Danil Antonovich - Ukrainian, born in 1911, in the village of Berestovenka, Kharkov region, Ukrainian SSR
In 1931 their family was dekulized. They were sent to the Urals to the settlement of Novoye Uglezhzheniye. Danila, Ivan and their mother spent one month on the road moving to settlement. This settlement was created as a special settlement for former kulaks.
Danila worked as a dispatcher in the charcoaling department, this department produced charcoal for the Chusovsky metallurgical plant.
According to the case file opened against him in the NKVD Department of the Sverdlovsk region, which I found in the Perm archive, he was arrested on December 23, 1937 on charges of spying for Poland.
The indictment says that since 1935 he was a participant of the Polish spy-sabotage organization.
As a member, he collected espionage information:
- about the amount of defense cargo passing through the Chusovskaya station
- about the political mood of the workers of the Chusovsky Forestry Department
- about the number of labor settlers in Kulak exile and their political mood.
He was also accused of spreading rumors about a number of riots against Soviet power in certain regions of the country, calling for an armed uprising of settlement workers.
Danil was sentenced to the capital punishment and shot two and a half months after his arrest.
He was shot on February 9, 1938, at a firing range near Yekaterinburg known as "Kilometer 12." Near the Memorial rest about 8 thousand residents of the Perm region, who were later rehabilitated afterwards.
Up until 1962, when the rehabilitation process began and the proceedings against Danil were terminated, my grandfather did not know what had happened to his brother.