"When the one who killed becomes an honorary pensioner with medals, that's something you don't forget."
"Guardians" of the memory of the victims of Soviet terror on the metamorphoses of attitudes towards the topic of repression
In 1974, political prisoners in Mordovia's camps declared a hunger strike, and October 30th became Political Prisoner's Day. In 1991, this day became officially known as Remembrance Day for the Victims of Political Repression in the USSR. The day before, a "Return of Names" event is usually held, in which participants read out the names of those from the "execution" list. In Moscow, the event took place at the Solovetsky Stone and attracted thousands of people, while in the regions, hundreds gathered at their memorial sites. In 2020, authorities banned such events due to COVID-19 restrictions. Since then, the number of people attending these events has either sharply decreased, or the commemorative events have ceased altogether—the names of those executed for political reasons have once again faded into oblivion.
NeMoskva spoke with members of the historical, educational, and human rights society Memorial (the International Memorial, along with many regional societies, were liquidated by the Ministry of Justice), who for three decades have been preserving the memory of those innocently repressed during the Soviet era and even earlier. The correspondent asked them the same questions: what connects them to the topic of repression, what is happening now with the memory of the repressed and why, and what to expect in the future. Here are their answers.
"The people have clearly oriented themselves in the current situation."
Deputy Chairman of the Tula branch of the Memorial Society Andrey Klochkov
One of his ancestors was a second-guild merchant, Matvey Yudin, from Krapivna. He owned stores, a textile factory, and forests—one of which is still called the "Yudin Dacha." He ran a cast-iron foundry with a mechanical engine and a grain mill in the village of Penkovo. He owned the Yudin Brothers Trading House, which included grocery, hardware, bread, and butcher shops, a stall, and a brick barn. He held various positions, from chairman of the Orphans' Court and trustee of the Krapivna Girls' Progymnasium to a member of the city's supply audit committee. He was arrested on October 25, 1937, following a denunciation. By decision of a troika of the NKVD Directorate for the Tula Region, he was sentenced to death on charges of "conducting anti-Soviet agitation among the population." The sentence was carried out on November 25, 1937, in Tula. Rehabilitated in December 1957.
Yudin's father-in-law, Mikhail Saburov, was a tsarist officer. He was executed as a "Polish spy" for being captured and surviving during the Polish War.
Today, they are iconic figures for the city, and museum exhibits are dedicated to them.
"People have clearly grasped the current situation and are trying to distance themselves from the memory of the victims of the repressions. Neither libraries nor museums want to be associated with this anymore or hold memorial events. Previously, we would announce upcoming events and provide three buses so that people could go to them." Tesnitsky leс There are other places; now they're offering one that holds about 30 people. The events used to be held at the regional level, with people coming from district towns, but now the level is being scaled down. No one gives speeches; everyone silently lays flowers. This year, we'll be reading a memorial prayer for about two hours—reading the names of those repressed. We've come up with an interesting idea for next year; we didn't have time this year, but we'll leave that for now.
Why do people forget their own repressed ancestors? Genetic memory kicked in, and that's why everyone's so reserved. When you're alone with a place of remembrance, it's a completely different matter. You come to Tesnitsky Forest and you're sure to meet someone, one or two people... They're remembering and commemorating. You get into a conversation—people talk about the injustice brought on by state terror. In reality, people understand everything, but they hide, pretending to survive. As always, we live a double life. And also because all this is happening because there was no condemnation back then. In the 1990s, they tried to [change] something; many people gathered on this day, but now only a small fraction do. However, recently, young people aged 35 and 40 have come to us. That's encouraging.
We still have to return to a normal path of development, where political actions are assessed, otherwise we will disappear, and that's it. After all, among those repressed were ordinary people, intoxicated by Soviet propaganda, glorifying Stalin, and yet they were taken and shot. And now Moskalyev is sitting a kilometer away from me [Alexey Moskalov — the father of Masha Moskaleva, who drew the anti-war picture, was sentenced to two years for discrediting the army.This colony used to be a prisoner-of-war camp. And yet, we'll live to see change; it's impossible to exist without development. Life will force us out of this.
"They're trying to erase a certain part of our memory and write down another."
Volunteer at the NKVD Investigative Prison Museum Stanislav Karmakskikh
"I've known since childhood that my grandmother's first husband was repressed. Maybe not since early childhood, but certainly since my teenage years. Then, when I started researching my family tree in more detail, I learned that my grandmother had also been in prison. I learned about the others when I started working in the archives."
I spent exactly two years in the archives. Two winters. I found a lot of details in a regular state archive, then I filed a complaint with the FSB. They said they had three files, but I couldn't prove the relationship for a long time. After that, they spent a long time picking my brains. And when the war started, they said they weren't letting anyone in. They advised me to go to Moscow, because they were letting people in in other cities, but in Tomsk there was a war. After I threatened to complain, they let me in. I found a relationship, and the FSB gave me the documents, but not all of them. They blacked out the names of strangers, the investigators. I received some. There are files. They haven't been read or processed yet.
I've always been an activist. At school, I was into military-patriotic activism. With a machine gun, a fiery face, and fire in my eyes. I have city committee certificates and all that. When I returned from the army, I was a religious activist. I constantly went to missionary sites, preaching to people. And when I learned about my ancestors, I became a "memorial" activist. I believe this is the most important thing now. For the simple reason that they are trying to erase some parts of our memory and record others. Adolf Hitler said: "I will not fight with old people, your children are mine." He was referring to school and patriotic education. Therefore, this topic is very important for all people with brains and understanding. And we must resist the system that is trying to drive us into a state of war. A global, nationwide war. A civil war, with the mythical NATO. Saltykov-Shchedrin said that if they shout "Motherland, Motherland," then they are stealing. And if they're shouting "Victory, Victory," then they're preparing fodder for a new war. Therefore, all those with an anti-fascist sentiment must understand where this is heading. And oppose the system.
"Those in power don't need this memory."
Director of the virtual museum "Perm-36» Yulia Balabanova
I don't know anything about the repressions my relatives endured. Perhaps they did, because my grandmother's stories about her Kuban relatives are full of blank spots. I first encountered the topic of Soviet repression at school: we read Akhmatova's "Requiem." In the 90s, many books and films about it began to appear, and the topic was in the air. Since 2009, I've visited the Perm-36 Museum of the History of Political Repression every year. In 2013, I became a journalist at Ekho Moskvy radio in Perm and met the leaders of Perm Memorial: Alexander Kalikh and Robert Latypov. I volunteered for the "Return of Names" campaign and went on the "Along the Rivers of Memory" expedition. In 2018, I was on the team for the "Voice Zone" project—an immersive audio performance-promenade through the sites of the Great Terror in Perm. I also participated in the "Last Address" campaign. And since 2022, I've been part of the team behind the Perm-36 Museum, which the state had effectively kicked out of the museum complex they'd built. Now we're working together to create a virtual museum to continue telling the truth about the late Soviet repressions against dissidents—a very uncomfortable topic for the authorities. So, I guess there wasn't a single story. It's just that what had been a spiritual need for many years gradually became my full-time job.
Compared to the 1990s, as far as I remember (I entered university in 96), attitudes have changed. Whereas previously there was a feeling of exhilaration at freedom, honesty, and liberation from fear, mixed with the horror of the uncovering truth, today Russian society seems tired of this topic. Human emotional resources are finite, as we see in the way modern war nightmares are normalized. Strong emotion should be the impetus for systemic change, but without it, society burns out.
Why? This has been discussed extensively, but it bears repeating. For over 30 years, the theme of repression in our country has centered around the figure of the victim. Learning about the victims, remembering them, and mourning them is crucial. But it's not enough. Because, besides the victims, there are at least two other figures who remain in the shadows. These are the executioner and the fighter. Every victim has an executioner. There are those who fabricated false charges against innocent people, there are those who tortured them in transit and in barracks, and there are those who "carried out the sentence." Finally, there are those who passed laws allowing the state to commit mass murder of its own citizens in the name of the state. Rarely have the names of those involved in these crimes even been mentioned publicly, let alone prosecuted. The archives of law enforcement agencies, briefly open to researchers in the early 90s, are now once again inaccessible. Even if the files of the repressed are released to their relatives, the details of the "authors and perpetrators" of the case remain sealed. The NKVD-KGB-FSB—this agency still does everything it can to protect itself. And it hasn't really changed much since Soviet times; its methods are recognizable. A legal assessment of the repressions hasn't been given—something Memorial members have been talking about all these years, and something we need to achieve in relation to both past and present repressions. This will add to the public's emotion of grief the feeling of the triumph of law and justice.
And the conscious fighters against the totalitarian system, who are also usually portrayed as its victims, are unfairly overshadowed. Here I would like to quote Anna Pastukhova, who headed the Yekaterinburg Memorial, and her interview To Novaya Gazeta shortly before his death: "The state is ready to uphold the memory of the victims of Stalin's terror, most of whom were not opponents of Soviet power, but random people. At the same time, the memory of those who fought for freedom and human dignity is being destroyed in every way. Perhaps now, when the Constitution and humanistic values are once again hanging in the balance, it's time to remember the political dissidents who intellectually opposed totalitarianism. They wrote honest books and expressed thoughts about freedom. Those in power don't need their memory. Of course, it's good that we've at least learned to pity the victims. But it's convenient to pity them; they can constantly multiply them, and then pity them again. It seems that today in Russia there isn't a single real museum or monument dedicated to the dissident movement.".
That is why we at the virtual museum “Perm-36” are celebrating October 30th this year as Political Prisoner's Day — in memory of the protests of Soviet dissidents of the 70s and 80s, not as a day of remembrance for the victims. And our fundamental emotion is respect and admiration for the courage of these people. The country needs heroes, not just victims. And our heroes are wonderful; I hope their symbolic future lies ahead.
We must understand that what is humane and what is just are not the same thing. We can empathize with them as human beings. Although, as I've already said, the emotion of empathy alone becomes quite a burden over time. But we must understand that justice has not prevailed for many of them: "...the very fact of reviewing and overturning a decision amounts to merely a formal recognition of its illegality, which does not always entail all aspects of rehabilitation. This, in a way, reflects the entire Soviet concept of law, with its prioritization of the public over the personal, the state over the private, with its strictly repressive policies and disregard for the protection of human rights" (A.L. Kononov, on the history of the adoption of the Russian Law "On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression"). Many Soviet dissidents were released "by pardon," and some even refused to leave prison under such a derogatory term. But we have experience with the adoption of the aforementioned Rehabilitation Law, which is unique in its own way, and we have experience working with this issue in the legal field. We simply need to revisit it as soon as possible.
Another major challenge is finding new narratives on the topic of repression that would be understandable to today's young people and teenagers, and finding new, contemporary forms of dialogue. And all of this is happening right now, both in the Russian-speaking community and in other countries affected by the "Red Terror": for example, the Czech international project GULAG XR for high school students. So, I think there is hope.
"An honest look at our past is unprofitable."
Former head of the Documentation Center of the Gulag History Museum, author of a book about repressed relatives and the search for their stories Alexander Makeev
"My family history is quite typical: on my father's side alone, I counted about 30 victims of repression [the prisoners themselves and their children]. Any of us who digs into our own family tree will find roughly the same thing. My great-grandfather, a Lutheran pastor named Voldemar Wagner, was sent to a camp in 1935. We knew he was alive at first—we received letters from him, but then they stopped. His wife and children sent inquiries to the KGB, but they were told nothing was known. Twenty years later, a false death certificate arrived, claiming he died in 1942 from an illness. I started digging and found out: he was shot."
It's wrong to say that interest in the repressions peaked in the 1990s. I took up the topic in 2015, when the third generation of those repressed became interested in the topic; there was another surge. This is typical of totalitarian regimes, when a generation raised in peace and prosperity becomes interested in what's going on. My generation [over 40] became interested in what was happening to their peers. And this learning, this reading of documents, had a unique impact. When my great-grandfather was executed, he was 39—the same age I was when I learned about it. It deeply affected me.
Some people's attitudes toward this memory are changing. An honest look at our past is unfavorable. Among other things, people have become fearful again. The traumatic experience of such a past is very painful, because you have to admit to yourself that something was done wrong, that something went wrong. People prefer to be proud of the past than to look objectively at what happened.
What will happen? The system that existed then, and the system that exists now, is unsustainable. It can't sustain itself or produce anything. It's a temporary simulacrum constructed from above; it will collapse, but people's memories will remain. After all, we're talking about a very deep sense of injustice toward their ancestors. When someone was unjustly killed, and the killer became an honorary pensioner with medals, such a thing is never forgotten. Such things live on and wear down a person, and these ghosts of the past will eventually surface. If the leadership collapses, everything will collapse. Even from North Korea, where "all is well," people are fleeing, risking their lives. From the GDR, where "all was well," they fled, dodging bullets. Let's remember the collapse of the USSR, let's remember how people are fleeing now. The outer shell collapses, and everything collapses in a short time. That's how it will be.
“Everything is initiated by the authorities and propaganda, but who carries it out?”
Former Chairman of the Perm Regional Branch of the International Society "Memorial" Robert Latypov
When I came to Memorial, I didn't even think I had repressed relatives. It was never talked about in our family. But then my father let it slip that his mother, my grandmother, had spent her early childhood in Kizel—a mining town in our Perm region. My grandmother was from Bashkiria. This triggered something in me; I intuitively understood that her family had been repressed. But no one talked about it at all! It was complete oblivion—I don't know what else to call it. Meanwhile, there was a dramatic story, which my grandmother finally told me literally a few days before her death. There were 14 people in her family, they were considered "kulaks" because they had... two cows. Her family was "dekulakized," and most of them died within the first year of deportation. Those who managed to survive escaped from there, miraculously returning to Bashkiria, but to a different village. On my mother's side, I don't really understand what happened there, but there was definitely something similar there.
This is one of the big problems, one I've encountered many, many times myself. It's a phenomenon: for some reason, we seem to think that people are always trying to pin down the fact that something happened to them, sometime. Nothing of the sort! The overwhelming majority of people and families try to forget the difficult, terrible details of their lives as much as possible, and generally remove anything that might remind them of the "bad." We're faced with the phenomenon of repressing "inconvenient" memories. In our vast country, this has always been prevalent (and, frankly, still is) and, I would say, was deliberately and artificially created. It's believed that the Soviet state alone was to blame for erasing the memory of the terror. Yes, but people themselves also participated in this, because they wanted to adapt to something "normal" from an official perspective. The norm was, "We're not guilty of anything, everything is fine with us. Well, sure, something happened, but we don't talk about it at all, because why bother?" And it turns out that people don’t talk not only to themselves, but also to their children, grandchildren, neighbors, colleagues. With no one at all.
Yes, of course, historical politics is shaped by certain messages, directives, and narratives from the political elite, but there's also feedback, a backlash, involving ordinary people. And many of them didn't want to talk about mass repressions and terror. They consider it inappropriate or even downright dangerous.
In modern Russia, there have long been signals that many of my fellow citizens have been very keenly aware of. Like, guys, let's just not talk about this anymore. Why? We have enough problems of our own here! And everyone understands that, yes, there are plenty of problems. What kind of "Return of Names"? What "Last Address"? Why do we need it? It's just another mental hassle. These signals are constantly being created and sent to the average person...
And then there are the "vigilant citizens" who remove those "Last Address" signs from the walls of their buildings. It's all initiated by the authorities and propaganda, of course. But who's enforcing it? These comrades, acting independently because it's now legally possible, face absolutely no legal consequences. Do you know of any examples of anyone facing real punishment for removing a "Last Address" sign? Not a single one! And what about any of those who tore down monuments to Polish and Lithuanian special settlers in the last year and a half? Meanwhile, they've already been destroyed in 25-30 Russian cities and villages. And the list grows every month. And local authorities cynically watch on.
Historical politics in the country today, especially when it comes to the history of Soviet and post-Soviet political terror, is no longer solely the state's responsibility. We can and should discuss the responsibility of a significant portion of Russian society, which, on the one hand, is directly involved, while on the other, is simply indifferent, thereby enabling a new wave of repression, a new wave of oblivion.
I'm saying some very unpleasant things right now. It pains me to process what's happening and understand that later, some time later, my fellow citizens and society will still have to somehow reflect on these utterly vile and despicable acts. First, they will have to be told about them, and it will be the brutal truth. They will have to understand this truth, and then accept it, and then they will have to do something with it, engage intellectually. For now, however, the majority of Russian society is completely disconnected from such processes.
And yet, I have a feeling that there are many Russians (whether abroad or in Russia) who are still thinking about this, who are asking difficult questions. Of themselves and of those around them. As long as projects like "Return of Names" exist, which you can watch right now—a collection of videos reading the names of terror victims—as long as "Last Address" exists, where, despite everything, new monuments suddenly appear, books are published, even though this is very difficult right now—there are people, conversations, visible interest in the topic, and real actions taken by people—there is hope. We are not hopeless!
There was an interesting story recently. The "Last Address" plaque was torn down. And in place of the lost traditional metal memorial, someone affixed a new plaque made of... paper cardboard. It was crafted in the same style and bore the same short inscription about the victim of terror who once lived in this house. A remarkable example of civic solidarity, demonstrating that the memory of those repressed evokes compassion, empathy, a desire to identify with our efforts, despite this darkness that has befallen us, to preserve ourselves and this difficult memory, to discuss it and ensure that it never goes away. We haven't talked about it yet. But we must. And we will.
Photo: tsn24.ru, nkvd.tomsk.ru, gulag-perm36.org
