It was established by the Supreme Soviet of Russia on 18 October 1991,[1] the same day as that body passed the "Law on the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression", a key piece of legislation still in force.

In a number of places the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates the Feast of Russia's New Martyrs and Confessors on the nearest Sunday to 25 January.

[9] In certain regions the victims of political repression are remembered on a different or additional date, e.g. the International Day of Remembrance at Sandarmokh on 5 August each year.

[13] The 2016 survey of commemorative sites and burial grounds conducted by St Petersburg Memorial is called "Russia's Necropolis of Terror and the Gulag".

[14] In 2014 the Research & Information Centre of St Petersburg Memorial found that 30 October was observed as an annual event at 103 of the commemorative sites it surveyed in Russia; it was much the most common date in the calendar.

In a smaller number of cases the event was organised by local NGOs and other public institutions, e.g. the various Associations for Victims of Political Repression, the Memorial Society,[17] and museums and schools in places like Inta,[18] Pechora[19] and Norilsk.

The ceremonies took place, for instance, at memorial cemeteries located at the killing fields of the late 1930s, such as Krasny Bor near Petrozavodsk and the Butovo in southern Moscow and at certain burial grounds of the Gulag, e.g. Yagrinlag graves near Severodvinsk.

The commemoration is held on the same date as the Day of the Political Prisoner in the USSR, a mid-1970s initiative led by imprisoned Soviet dissidents Kronid Lyubarsky and Alexander Murzhenko.

[47] An attempt to separate the victims of Stalin and Lenin from contemporary political prisoners was made in Moscow and some other places with the emergence of the unofficial "Restoring the Names" ceremony on the day before.

[51] On Sunday 29 October 2017, 5,286 people attended the Restoring the Names ceremony at the Solovki Stone a short distance from FSB (NKVD) headquarters on Lubyanka Square.

[52] The next day, Monday 30 October 2017, the Wall of Sorrow (designer Georgy Frangulyan), a massive new monument to the Victims of Political Repression, was opened on Sakharov Avenue by President Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Among them were: elderly relatives of those repressed in the Stalin period; members of the committee that judged several hundred entries in a competition to design the new memorial (Ludmila Alexeyeva, Natalya Solzhenitsyn, Roman Romanov); and human rights officials from the presidential administration (Mikhail Fedotov, Tatiana Moskalkova and Vladimir Lukin).

This proposal, made ostensibly on the grounds of renovation work on Lubyanka Square, proved unsuccessful[54] and the "Restoring the Names" ceremony went ahead as usual on 29 October 2018.