Today we publish a letter that came from one of our media subscribers. The author of this text has spent more than thirty years researching the fate of his grandfather - engineer Petr Petrovich Rempel, who died in the gulag camps in the 1940s. During this time, strange circumstances have come to light in the story - it is possible that Petr Petrovich was indeed involved in the underground work of resistance to Soviet power.

2024 marks the 80th anniversary of the  deportation of the Crimean Tatars, a crime perpetrated by Stalin’s regime. This is indeed a mournful date, particularly dark because repressions against Crimean Tatars continue to this day, arguably as a direct follow up to the Soviet period. Activists call this a “hybrid deportation.”