Maly Trascjanec in post-Soviet times

The former Jewish cemetery and the Leonid Levin History Workshop in Minsk are listed here.

The map shows the memorial stone in Blahaǔščyna and the "Forest of Names"

The map lists the monuments of the new landscape of remembrance

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Maly Trascjanec memorial changed. The post-Soviet culture of remembrance had a major impact on the planning and design of the memorial landscape in the mid-2010s.

Until 2008, the crimes against humanity at Maly Trascjanec were increasingly but hesitantly remembered. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Jews – both local and deported from Central Europe – increasingly became the focus of Belarusian and international remembrance culture as a group of victims. But the road from isolated citizens' initiatives and the construction of individual monuments or memorials to a large memorial landscape at Maly Trascjanec was long.

Next to the Commemoration at the former Jewish cemetery in Minsk and the Leonid Levin History Workshop, the following pages will also be about the Memorial stone in Blahaǔščyna, which since 2002 has been the first commemorative object to commemorate the execution site in the forest. The first citizens' initiatives and plans for a memorial stone had already existed before that, but the actual implementation dragged on into 2002.¹

With the "Forest of Names", which focuses on the memory of individual fates, the memorial area in the forest was further expanded in 2010 through civil involvement.

After the International Centre for Education and Exchange(IBB) had been working for the establishment of a memorial in Maly Trascjanec, the state memorialization of Maly Trascjanec was initiated by the state in 2015. Further structural changes took place in two phases on the way to a memorial landscape.² In June 2015, the first construction phase of the new memorial began with work on the "Gate of Remembrance". The second construction phase followed from August 2017; during this phase, the "Path of Death" was created, on which representatives of German and Belarusian civil society were able to exert an influence. The memorial is explicitly dedicated to Jewish victims of the National Socialists.³ On the former execution site in Blahaǔščyna, a large memorial complex was built, but there was no participation of civil society actors.⁴