Victims of Stalin’s Great Terror named in online database

Unique documents and photo materials displaying the tragic events that took place in Georgia from 1937 to 1938 during Stalin’s Soviet Regime, otherwise known as the Great Terror, has been collected on the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia website.

The online database named ‘Stalin’s Lists on Georgia’ was described as the first electronic database with a search program and included short biographies of more than 3,600 people.

A presentation announcing the online database was held yesterday and hosted by the South Caucasus Regional Office of the Heinrich Boell Foundation and the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia.

Previously ‘Stalin’s Lists on Georgia’ was only available in CD format.

The project to find and put together data about victims of the Great Terror started in 2013. A group of researchers spent more than two year searching and analyzing information about victims of the 1937-38 regime for the database.

In those two years, which is known as the Great Terror, more than 3,600 people were executed by the order of members of Politbureau and Stalin himself. About 3,100 of them were condemned to the highest measure of punishment – shooting. The sentence was executed in Tbilisi, Kutaisi, Batumi and Sokhumi.

From 2011 to 2013, the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information (IDFI) in cooperation with International Society "Memorial” (Russian Federation) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia implemented the project ‘Stalin's Lists on Georgia’, with financial support of the Embassy of Switzerland in Georgia and Heinrich Boell Foundation South Caucasus Regional Office.