The October 29 commemoration is organised by the Memorial human rights group, with the names of people persecuted during the Soviet terror and in more recent times publicly read out, public broadcaster Polish Radio’s IAR news agency reported.
Until 2020, thousands of Russians gathered on Lubyanka Square each year to read out the names of people killed or persecuted by the Soviet regime.
The Kremlin later banned public gatherings, citing the COVID-19 pandemic, and tightened restrictions on public assembly following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, according to the IAR news agency.
Despite the restrictions, it said, a group of Western ambassadors, including Krajewski, have continued to lay flowers beside the Solovetsky Stone, which commemorates victims of the Soviet Gulag system.
In recent years, only a handful of people in Moscow have risked publicly reading out the names of victims of political repression. The commemoration, however, is held in dozens of cities around the world, including Warsaw, Kraków and Wrocław in Poland.
The Kremlin has sought to suppress or revise the historical record of Soviet repression, including by challenging historians’ findings about Soviet responsibility for the 1940 Katyn Massacre, in which thousands of Polish military officers and other prisoners were killed by Soviet secret police.
Moscow denied responsibility for the Katyn Massacre for decades, and the subject remained taboo during the period when Poland was under Soviet control after World War II until 1989.
The Lubyanka building on Lubyanka Square in central Moscow served as the notorious headquarters and interrogation prison for Soviet secret police agencies from 1918 until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.
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Source: IAR, polskieradio24.pl