Last Address



The Last Address («Последний адрес») is a large-scale public memorial project designed to memorialize the memory of innocent people who died as a result of political repressions committed by the Soviet authorities. Its principle is "One name, one life, one sign". As part of the project, a small, palm-sized, minimalist metal memorial sign of rectangular shape is installed on the house that became the last lifetime address of the victim of state arbitrariness. It bears the name of the murdered person, his year of birth, profession, dates of arrest, death and year of rehabilitation. On the left side of the plaque is a square hole, reminiscent of a photograph missing from the card. The aggregate of many such personalized memorials forms a "network" memorial scattered in different cities around the world.

Description
The project is the initiative of Moscow and St. Petersburg historians, civic and civil rights activists, journalists, architects, designers and writers.

The project initiative had originated with journalist and publisher Sergey Parkhomenko, who saw in Germany the stones of the European Stolpersteine project to commemorate the victims of Nazism. Within the scope of that project, over 50,000 memorial stones were set up in Germany and other countries of Europe. The organizers of "Last Address" intend to install a comparable number of plaques across Russia.

The memorial sign is a stainless steel plaque 11 x with the information on the repressed person: his or her name, profession, date of birth, date of arrest, date of death, date of exoneration. The design of the memorial plaques is by architect Alexander Brodsky. The hole in the plaque symbolizes the missing photo.

The project is based on the law “On the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repressions” adopted in 1991. The law treats the period of political repressions in Russia and USSR as starting on 25 October (7 November) 1917. The official representative of the project is the nonprofit entity Last Address Foundation for the Commemoration of Victims of Political Repression (Фонд увековечения памяти жертв политических репрессий «Последний Адрес») founded by the Memorial Society and a number of individual persons through voluntary contributions from private citizens and organizations.

On 15 June 2018 "The last address" received a German Karl Wilhelm Fricke award. Its monetary part will be sent to the Ukrainian project "Ostannya Addresa", in order to avoid the status of a "foreign agent".

Installing memorial signs in Russia
The first Russian cities to install memorial signs became Moscow and Saint Petersburg. On 7 February 2020, the thousandth memorial sign was installed in Russia: in the city of Gorokhovets, Vladimir Oblast. By that moment the plaques were also installed in the following cities: Yekaterinburg, Rostov-on-Don, Perm, Taganrog, Barnaul, Krasnoyarsk, etc.

In Moscow
The first memorial signs of “Last Address” project were installed in Moscow on Human Rights Day, 10 December 2014. Some of the signs were made in response to applications of the residents of houses where repressed people had lived.

The next batch of signs was installed in February–March 2015. By January 2015, over 500 applications for the installation of memorial sign had been submitted. Since 2016, the installation of memorial signs is being performed usually 2 times per month.

In St. Petersburg
The first 12 memorial signs on the houses of Saint Petersburg were installed on 21–22 March 2015;

In Perm and Perm Krai
“Last Address” was launched in Perm in February 2014. The first four plaques were installed on 10 August 2015. The project founder Serguei Parkhomenko came from Moscow to Perm; in an interview to Zvezda magazine he talked about the ways to launch an initiative group, what the cases of the repressed were telling us and whether it was necessary or advisable to install signs commemorating the organizers of repressions.

The first village with a “Last Address” sign was the village Kupros of Yusvinsky District, Komi-Permyak Okrug. The memorial sign was installed on 11 August 2015 on the façade of the house that was the last residential address of peasant Valentin Startsev, declared by investigators “an active participant of the liquidated counterrevolutionary insurgent organization.” Investigators claimed that Startsev was “conducting counterrevolutionary defeatist agitation among kolkhoz members, trying to prove the inevitability of the fall of Soviet power,” “praising the old Tsarist regime and proving unprofitability of kolkhozes”; as a result, he was sentenced to capital punishment in the form of execution by a firing squad.

Installing memorial signs in other countries
The first country outside Russia became Ukraine, where a separate project "Остання адреса – Україна" based on Russian "Last address" started working. On 5 May 2017 the first three commemorative plaques were installed on three houses in Kyiv.

On 7 June 2017, on the day of political prisoners, signs of the Last address appeared on the facades of four houses in Prague.

On 2 August 2018, the Ultima adresa project was launched in Moldova: the first two plates of the “Last Address” appeared in Chișinău.

On 5 October 2018, the Georgian project "უკანასკნელი მისამართი. საქართველო", "Last Address, Georgia" officially started.

On 30 August 2019, the first commemorative plaque appeared in Germany, in the Thuringian city of Treffurt.