Solovetsky Stone

It has been the focus of tributes since 16 February 2024, when the Federal Penitentiary Service announced that activist and opposition leader Alexei Navalny had died at the prison in Yamalo-Nenets in Western Siberia.

[citation needed] Subsequently many monuments erected across Russia to the victims of the Soviet regime emulated the same stark and abstract simplicity, also using large unshaped or rough-hewn boulders, for example the memorial in Nizhny Novgorod's Bugrovskoe cemetery.

It was on 30 October 2007 that Vladimir Putin visited the Butovo firing range near Moscow [4] and ten years later on the same date he and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church inaugurated the Wall of Sorrow in the city itself.

The rock is set on a polished granite base bearing four inscriptions: "To the inmates of the Gulag", "To the victims of Communist Terror", "To those who Fought for Freedom" and a famous line from Anna Akhmatova's long poem Requiem (1935-1961): "I would like to recall them all by name,/ but ..." (the lists have been taken—there's no one to ask).

[5] According to the Solovki Encyclopedia, the architect Ukhnalyov and State Duma deputy Yuly Rybakov themselves covered the costs of the memorial's creation, including transportation of the 10,400 kg (22,900 lb) boulder from the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea.