Victims of Political Repression Monument in Tayshet

In the summer of 2020, a monument to the victims of Stalinist political repression was unveiled in the city of Tayshet in Irkutsk Oblast, Russia. On July 4, 2020, the monument was vandalised and defaced, making the inscription illegible. During Soviet rule, the Gulag camp Taishetlag was located near the city, making Tayshet a stop which all prisoners made on their journey to the Gulag. In the twenty-first century, President Vladimir Putin’s reconstruction of Stalin’s figure and Soviet patriotism provoked the emergence of many new monuments to Stalin and the vandalism of those commemorating victims. Monuments remembering the victims of the Stalinist era provide a physical and spatial rebuttal to heroic memories of Stalinism. This case analyses the ongoing clash between the unofficial rehabilitation of Stalin and the commemoration of victims of the Soviet system of repression, taking the monument in Tayshet as an example.