Irina Shcherbakov was at the birth of the human rights movement A reminder. Together with her colleagues, she devoted herself to discovering the crimes of Stalinism and teaching about this dark side of Russian history. At the same time, however, the post-World War II era became one of the focal points of Vladimir Putin’s regime’s propaganda.
According to the authorities, the work of the historians discredited attacking the cult of Stalin as well as celebrating an extraordinary victory. As time passed, there were attempts against Memorial to limit and stop its activities. First, he received a foreign agent label, on the basis of which the court decided to dissolve it. According to him, the group supported terrorism and extremism.
Despite this, the historians continued their work, and many of them faced criminal charges in trials that their colleagues described as political.
In an interview for Seznam Zpravy, Scerbakovová talks about what she hopes for Russia now, as well as why, in her opinion, Remembrance has become an unpleasant voice for the regime.
You are one of Russia’s leading historians and you are particularly interested in finding crimes from the Stalin era. When did it become a dangerous profession in Russia?
I would not say that my work as a historian is dangerous. But what I see that was dangerous was the educational work and spreading awareness about what we do as a group. We organized various events and competitions for students and teachers, but when Monument was banned by the regime and declared a foreign agent, this work became more and more difficult.
We understood that teachers and children are always under some kind of pressure from the regime and we could not help them with that. The pressure in society created by government structures and by the FSB created fear among people, so it was normal for people to be afraid to speak up. So this was the fear that created the biggest challenge for our work.
A reminder
The beginning of the memorial dates back to the second half of the 1980s, when the idea arose to build a memorial to the victims of communist repression next to the KGB secret service building on Lubyansk Square. in Moscow. One of the founders of the organization and the first honorary chairman was academic, dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrey Sakharov.
The Memorial collected all available knowledge about Soviet state terror. Since 1989, more than 1,500 monuments to victims of political violence have been erected in Russia, of which 210 are in Moscow. Activists were also mapping the sites of former penal camps – gulags -, collecting and publishing the names of those who had been executed, advocating for the rehabilitation of those who had been executed. accused unfairly, but also compiled lists of those who were killed in the Chechen wars or who helped people who were imprisoned in recent years. for political positions.
A Russian court dissolved the group in December 2021 after it was accused of violating the controversial law on foreign agents.
For many years, Memorial has done a great job, for example, in terms of mapping the victims of the Stalin regime. The regime gradually began to limit its activities before banning it. Why is your organization so concerned about the regime?
First, Memorial has always focused on human rights. We started our activities during the first Chechen war in the 1990s. That was the first thing that worried the regime. And the second: when Putin came, such work began to change or make the history of Russia.
It cannot be said that it was his ideology, but I would call it his political intention. Putin relied on aggressive nationalistic propaganda, to instill some national pride in this direction. And he encouraged the people’s pride in winning the Second World War.
We at the Memorial dealt with documents that revealed the dark side of this period. Dictatorship, repression and we pointed out that the state was proceeding criminally. So we slowly became an ideological enemy of Putin’s regime.
When the monument was dissolved by the decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, which came, at least, three days after the war in Ukraine, the prosecutor told us openly that the monument -memory builds an image of the former. Soviet Union as a terrorist state, and of course the regime did not like that.
With the human rights group Kummhinechan, you continue to campaign for more open communication about the crimes committed during the Stalin era. How important do you think it is for Russia to face its Soviet past?
The system in which the Soviet Union operated and in which the Soviets lived was built during Stalin’s time. And in the 1990s, this system was not reformed enough, real democratic institutions were not being built.
Because we see that our past is lying like a corpse somewhere by the side of the road, and like a Golem or Frankenstein, it will come back to life and begin to be dangerous for our freedom. That is why it is important for us to spread awareness about this part of history.
A discussion about the rewriting of Russian history
Yuri Dmitriev exposed the crimes of Stalinism for decades before his arrest. “I think I underestimated the regime for a long time. Yuri never did that,” said the director of the film, which shows the work of the historian and the political horror, for SZ.
What do you think Vladimir Putin is trying to achieve by bending history?
I think that Putin is basing himself on this ideology from the post-Soviet state and on the fact that nobody can do anything against the state. He can get around it in some way, for example by falsifying documents or challenging it, but the result is always that he can do nothing against the state. Because it will always be stronger, so a person has to learn how to change, how to work in it, but he cannot think about changing.
Putin has proposed such a statement that the state is not only stronger and higher than the individual, but that he should be proud of it. To your state. According to him, the Soviet Union won the Second World War precisely because the Soviet Union was led by a strong personality, who was Stalin, during the Second World War. If it wasn’t there, it wouldn’t have turned out so well.
What inspired you to dedicate your life to the protection of human rights and mapping history? How to deal with pressure from the regime even under the shadow of prison for two colleagues Oleg Orlov and Yuri Dmitriev?
It is difficult to talk about it, because I left Russia some time ago. But it was very difficult for me to experience and see how my friends and colleagues were unjustly imprisoned.
It was heartbreaking for me to watch Oleg Orlov’s trial as well, and we are glad that he is now free thanks to the exchange, although he himself said that it would have been better if they had exchange them for someone else. But of course we are still under pressure. We expect nothing but bad news and further erosion of legal rules. Of course, we still have some hope, but the situation is the same and it is difficult both for us who are free and for those who are longer behind bars.
Irina Shcherbakov
Irina Shcherbakov was born in 1949 in Moscow. She worked as a German and a historian. She translated German literature into Russian and was an editor of literary magazines.
She has been investigating Stalin-era crimes since the 1970s and co-founded the human rights group Memorial, which was banned in Russia in 2021. Among other things, she received the German Federal Cross, Carl Prize von Ossietzky and the Goethe Medal. He currently lives in exile in Thuringia.
We have always supported liberal democratic ideas, and we were also accused of this, because we were somehow waiting for good changes and that something would change in the Russia and somehow leading its way to democracy. And now people laugh at us for living in some impossible illusion.
It is very difficult to see how evil is winning day by day in Russia. Time after time we see how evil wins and it’s like a bad fairy tale. And it’s really hard for us to just look at it. It is like a big dragon that Ukraine is fighting, which is not strong enough. So the question we ask ourselves is how can we beat it.
What would Russia have to be like for you to be willing to return to it? What are your hopes for change now?
As long as Putin is in Russia, I will not go back there. I won’t go into the other scenarios now, this is scenario number one, but I don’t know if I’ll live to see it this time. Because Putin takes great care of his health, it is a priority for him.
You can say that he has no heart, no emotions, so he lives as a kind of golem, he can live a long time. But history is unpredictable, it already knows many twists and turns and unexpected changes, and we hope so. But really the main thing is that I will definitely not go back there under Putin.
2024-10-02 12:00:00
#Interview #Russian #historian #Irina #Ščerbakovová
