The destruction forms part of a broader trend in Russia of erasing foreign memory sites, particularly since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
According to a September 2023 report by the Russian-language service of the BBC, Russia's large-scale campaign to remove foreign memorials began shortly after the February 2022 invasion.
The removals have affected not only tributes to repression victims but also monuments to foreign soldiers, including Finnish and Italian nationals.
While many of the Polish memorials were removed quietly by unidentified parties, others were dismantled with support from local authorities.
The trend has raised concerns among Polish officials and historians, who see it as part of a wider attempt by Russia to suppress historical facts inconvenient to its imperial narrative.
Several of the removed memorials were located in cemeteries, and honoured people who suffered under Josef Stalin’s regime, Poland's PAP news agency has reported.
The most recent known act of vandalism took place in December last year in Borovichi-Yogla, in Russia’s northwestern Novgorod region.
There, three monuments dedicated to members of the Polish underground Home Army (AK) were destroyed.
The soldiers had died in Soviet prison camps following their arrest and deportation between 1944 and 1946.
More than 6,000 Poles passed through the Borovichi camp complex after being deported by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police.
One of the earliest known removals in this campaign occurred on November 11, 2022, Poland’s Independence Day. In the Tomsk region of Siberia, three memorial sites were vandalised or destroyed in a single day.
These included a monument in Tomsk honouring Polish victims of Stalinist repression, a commemorative plaque on a former Polish orphanage that housed deported children during World War II, and crosses and plaques in the Polish-settled villages of Białystok and Połozowo, both founded in the 19th century.
The latter two sites had honoured villagers executed during the so-called Polish Operation of the NKVD – a 1937–1938 purge that targeted ethnic Poles.
In October 2024, a symbolic installation at the Levashovo Wasteland near St. Petersburg was removed.
The site is a cemetery for victims of Stalinist repression. The makeshift cross-shaped monument had replaced an earlier Polish memorial that was taken down without notice in 2023.
A video published by Russian news outlet RusNews showed a woman claiming to be a cemetery employee stating that she was acting on orders to remove what she called an "unauthorised monument."
Another significant case occurred in October 2023 in the city of Vladimir, where a plaque commemorating Jan Stanisław Jankowski was removed without explanation.
Jankowski was one of the leaders of the Polish wartime resistance and a key figure in the so-called Trial of the Sixteen, an infamous 1945 show trial staged by the Soviets.
He died under suspicious circumstances in Vladimir Prison in 1953.
The memorial wall also included plaques for the Greek Catholic priest Blessed Klemens Sheptytsky, posthumously honoured as Righteous Among the Nations by Israel’s Yad Vashem, and for Lithuanian and Japanese political prisoners. All were removed.
In September 2023, authorities in Yakutsk, Siberia, dismantled a monument to Polish deportees who had contributed to Russian science and culture after being exiled there.
Among those honoured were explorers and ethnographers such as Wacław Sieroszewski, Edward Piekarski, Jan Czerski and Aleksander Czekanowski.
Also taken down was a plaque honouring victims of political repression and deportation from the 17th to 20th centuries.
That same month, near Vorkuta in Russia's Komi Republic, a monument to Polish victims of forced labour camps was removed.
Erected in 1997, the monument stood at the entrance to the former Vorkutinskaya mine, where many Polish soldiers and civilians were imprisoned.
Between 1944 and 1952, the number of Poles held in the Vorkuta camp system ranged from over 500 to nearly 3,000.
In June 2023, crosses and nameplates were removed from the graves of Polish exiles in the Sverdlovsk region of the Ural Mountains.
In the Buryatia Republic, a monument marking the burial site of Poles who took part in the 1866 uprising against Russian rule was also vandalised.
In May 2023, a symbolic gravestone for Polish victims of Stalinist repression was taken down near Irkutsk. A large wooden Lithuanian cross was also removed.
This time, officials cited "pathway renovations" as the reason. It was one of the few cases in which a Russian institution acknowledged responsibility for removing a memorial.
In April 2023, a remote monument in the Perm region commemorating Polish and Lithuanian deportees buried at the former Galashor exile settlement was destroyed.
The site had been funded by a Lithuanian organisation in 2016, but no information was available on when or how the destruction occurred.
In July 2023, a granite cross bearing the inscription "We forgive and ask for forgiveness" was removed from Levashovo Cemetery.
It had been erected in the early 1990s by the local Polish community with the support of the Russian human rights organisation Memorial.
Conflicting explanations for its removal were given. Local authorities said it had been damaged either by vandals or by a fallen tree.
Memorial, a research and human rights organisation, was founded during the perestroika years to document human rights abuses committed by the Soviet regime.
It is the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. Russian authorities outlawed and closed its Russia operation in December 2021, three months before the invasion of Ukraine.
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP