Historian Oleg Novosyolov studied Stalinist repressions in the Urals — at the end of last ...

Historian Oleg Novosyolov studied Stalinist repressions in the Urals — at the end of last week he was sent to a pretrial detention center

Oleg Novosyolov is a 37-year-old historian and local history researcher from Yekaterinburg. On May 7, he was arrested — the researcher is accused of aiding terrorism. He faces up to 15 years in prison. Exactly what the criminal case is connected to is unknown. But several days before the arrest, Novosyolov’s name had already appeared on Rosfinmonitoring’s list of “terrorists and extremists.”

🟧 What Oleg Novosyolov did

For many years, Novosyolov researched political repression in Sverdlovsk Oblast, worked in archives, and ran the Telegram channel “Repressions in Sverdlovsk.” He wrote about the fates of the repressed, NKVD officers, the mechanisms of the Great Terror, and how the state is gradually destroying the memory of repression.

In the fall of 2025, it was Novosyolov who was among the first to report that archives in several regions had stopped giving researchers access to the files of rehabilitated victims of political repression. The institutions cited an order by Rosarkhiv that allowed them not to release documents if “they may pose a potential threat to the interests of the Russian Federation.”

“How can this subordinate legal act override federal law? It’s nonsense,” the historian said at the time.

🟧 What else the researcher may have done to displease the Russian authorities

Oleg Novosyolov not only researched the era of the Great Terror, but also actively expressed his civic position. For example, at the end of 2024, despite persecution even for solo pickets, Novosyolov came to the Lenin monument in Yekaterinburg with a placard in memory of human rights defender Anatoly Marchenko, who died in a Soviet prison 38 years earlier.

In addition, Novosyolov organized tours around Yekaterinburg where he spoke about the victims and executioners of the Stalin era. And on his Telegram channel of nearly three thousand subscribers, the historian often drew parallels between Soviet repression and the present day. Read him!

🟧 How historians are persecuted in Russia

Novosyolov’s case is not the only one. For example, in the same Yekaterinburg, genealogist Yury Konovalov of the Ural Historical and Genealogical Society is being tried. He is accused of allegedly photographing documents and not paying for it, thereby “causing damage to the Sverdlovsk Oblast archive.”

Anatoly Svechnikov, a council member of Yekaterinburg’s Memorial, explains in an interview with the outlet “Sibir. Realii” that Novosyolov’s arrest is part of the state’s struggle against historians and history.

“It seems to me that this is all simply moving toward the complete closure of information about repression as a phenomenon. Even for relatives of the repressed. Well, maybe they’ll show people the first two or three pages of a case and the last ones. I think it is important for them now to completely hide the names of the investigators who tortured those arrested, and the names of the informers,” says Svechnikov.

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Oleg Novosyolov / Photo from personal archive