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Keeping memory alive: the vital work of Russia’s Memorial organisation is under threat

By:   []

Date: 2021-12

“One day you’re studying a samizdat text from the 1970s, the next you’re having tea with the person who wrote it”

Josie von Zitzewitz. Lecturer in Russian, New College, University of Oxford

Josie von Zitzewitz | Source: Personal archive

In the late 1960s and 1970s, an entire unofficial literary sphere began to flourish in Moscow and St Petersburg.

It was made up of younger intellectuals who realised that the Soviet Union’s official literary journals were not for them – their work would either not be published or censored. And so they started setting up their own journals and writers’ circles.

These self-made journals and seminars in people’s apartments made up a whole cultural underground, which, of course, was forbidden, because any such activities should run through state-approved or state-sponsored channels. Today, if you buy a book from this period, it’s usually a book which will have first circulated in samizdat.

Then, in the 1980s and 1990s when Memorial sprang up, people who had often simply amassed these manuscripts at home gave them to the organisation. And because these texts had no print runs, were often submitted anonymously and so on, there is often little information about their circumstances – they need a context. The people who work at Memorial were themselves witnesses to this period, and can always help you understand. One day you’re studying a samizdat text from the 1970s, the next you’re having tea with the person who wrote it, all thanks to Memorial.

Indeed, the Memorial branches in St Petersburg and Moscow have collected an enormous amount of written, but also oral, testimonies from eyewitnesses. Anybody who is interested in history, sociological questions or literary history needs to understand the context in which it was produced. If you want to know why people were silent under Stalinism, you need to hear their testimonies. So the fact that Memorial has recorded the experiences of people who were not great dissidents or activists is invaluable. When scholars look from a bird’s eye perspective, they may often say when reading a document for the first time: “Oh, that's interesting material.” But Memorial’s work reminds us that these documents we have from the past are also artefacts of people’s lives.

As somebody born in Germany, another country with a monstrous and murderous past, I am actually astonished that the Russian state leaves the work of making sense of history to a handful of people working on a shoestring budget – and then tries to put spanners in the works.

“Closure will become a stigma”

Anke Giesen. Member of the Board of International Memorial, Memorial Germany

Anke Gisen | Source: Personal archive

The German Memorial organisation was founded in 1992, by people who wanted to support the St Petersburg - at that time Leningrad – Memorial. We supported work with people who survived the Gulag, repression and went through the Leningrad blockade. We forged personal ties with this generation, provided these people with all possible financial aid.

The German organisation is part of International Memorial, and we are included in important decisions on the organisations’ development. That said, all the organisations – including the ones in Czechia, Belgium, France and Italy – work independently of one another.

Soon after that initial work, our organisation decided to deal with Soviet repressions in East Germany. During the Soviet occupation, people could be detained on false charges; there were committees that passed sentences without any legal framework. Almost nothing was known about these people in the GDR, the topic was taboo. In West Germany no one was interested in this.

In particular, German Memorial was the first to start working on the KGB prison in Potsdam, where people were detained by the occupation authorities. We ensured that this prison became a memorial: you can learn about the fate of German citizens who fell into the hands of the security services, and were then sent to Moscow and shot. Now we are working to promote the memory of repressions against Russian Germans [ethnic Germans living on what is now Russian Federation territory]. We want more information about them in Germany itself.
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