Good news on the “Stone of Sorrow” that was vandalized back in November. At first, police had reported that there was nothing they could do, because the stone wasn’t an officially designated monument, despite the years of ceremonies and the consecration of the monument in 1992. This decision had the staff of the NKVD Remand Prison Museum at 44 Lenin Avenue worried that anyone would be able to do whatever they wanted to the stone. Reports from yesterday, however, state that public pressure has had a positive effect: the stone has been labelled an object of cultural heritage: in other words, a monument that cannot be vandalized without repercussion.
Below is a photo I took of the stone with my phone, Summer 2016.
Sorrow Stone dedicated to the victims of Bolshevik Terror
(Image from the Memorial Museum “NKVD Remand Prison” 
For instance, A. P. Tolochko shows that Tomsk gubernaia had by far the largest number of pro-monarchist organizations in Siberia, and that the city of Tomsk itself likely had the largest number of individual members. If at the end of 1906, beginning of 1907 the Tobol’sk region had 1 such organization, the Tomsk region had 11, despite very similar economic situations in both parts of Western Siberia. [see A. P. Tolochko, “Territorial’noe razmeshchenie, chislennost’ i sotsial’nyi sostav chernosotennykh organizatsii v sibiri v nachal’nik XX v,” in Chelovok v Istorii, edited A. N. Zheravina et. al. (Tomsk: Tomsk University Press, 1999), 198-206.] 
