A public documentary study “Memory for the future” was held, timed to coincide with the Remembrance of Victims of Mass Political Repressions and Famine on May 31.

Public documentary research is an opportunity to get acquainted with the results of many years of work of the Temirtau Museum to restore the scale of the tragedy of the Stalin repressions era in the KazakhstanRepublic , on the example of the Samarkand village(since 1945 - Temirtau city).

The study participants, high school students of city schools, were provided with little-known and previously unpublished electronic copies of documents and memoirs of Temirtau city’s residents, statistics of repressions in our region.

Based on the documents identified by the museum - lists and memoirs of special settlers and those deported on a national basis, certificates of rehabilitation, all stages of repressions in the USSR were considered: from collectivization to political repressions under the articles of the criminal code.

Much attention was paid to the local history nature of the documents. One of the goals of public research is to reveal the depth of the tragedy of totalitarianism. The tragedy did not take place somewhere far away, in another country, in another region or city. This happened everywhere in the KazakhstanRepublic and affected, including the residents of Temirtau city.

The final question of documentary research: is it worth it, more than 90 years after the era of totalitarianism, to raise archival documents and cover the Stalin era, and pass this knowledge on to posterity?