Illustrative photo

Illustrative photo

Illustrative photo

Statistics and Overview

On April 6, 2021 the International Memorial Society is holding a round table in Moscow entitled "70 Years of Operation "North"". An online live transmission of the event is being made available

Moscow

The International Historical and Educational Society Memorial holds a round table "70 Years of Operation "North"" about the persecution of believers in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The MGB USSR conducted Operation North in early April 1951. This was a forced relocation of identified Jehovah's Witnesses with their families to remote areas of the USSR.

The conversation will be broadcast online on the International Memorial channel at the link. It will begin on April 6, 2021 at 6:00 p.m.

Pavel Polyan, historian and expert in the study of forced migrations in the USSR, has been invited to participate in the roundtable. He will address the topic of "Operation North: Deportation for the Faith.” In addition, Aleksandr Daniel, co-chairman of the St. Petersburg Memorial Society, will speak on "Some specific methods of criminal prosecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in the 1950s and 1960s.” Human rights activist Valery Borschev of the Moscow Helsinki Group will speak on the persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. Sergey Davidis, a member of the Board of the Memorial Human Rights Center and head of the program "Support for Political Prisoners," will speak about "Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in 2017-2021: chronology, statistics, formal justifications." Yaroslav Sivulsky from the European Association of Jehovah's Witnesses has been invited to participate in the discussion. The moderator of the round table is Aleksandr Guryanov, head of the Polish Research Program of International Memorial.

This round table is not the only commemorative event on the anniversary of Operation North. On April 1, a press conference was held in Moscow (a recording is available online). On the same day in Chisinau a scientific conference was held under the auspices of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova with the participation of Balti and Cahul State Universities. In addition, a scientific conference is planned in Kiev.