An exhibition by Memorial International, a group that is a symbol of post-Soviet democratization and was dissolved this week by Russian justice, reveals the legacy of women sent by the regime of Soviet leader Josef Stalin to prison camps.
“I ask permission to send a telegram. At the time of my arrest, two children, aged two and four, were in my apartment!” This order is written in a beautiful, curved handwriting. The penitentiary director’s response was short and direct: “Denied!”
This telegram is just one of more than a thousand documents collected by the Russian foundation and human rights organization Memorial International. It is probably the last exhibition by the entity known for denouncing persecution since the time of Stalin. The Russian Supreme Court ordered this Tuesday (28) the dissolution of the entity, on charges of violating laws on sources of funding from abroad.
About 200 objects — including patched clothing, everyday items like a nail file made from a piece of pottery and a needle made from a fishbone, letters and drawings, some of which never sent — were collected by the foundation for the exhibition “Material, the Gulag’s Female Memory”, in the basement of the entity’s headquarters in Moscow.
For 33 years, Russia’s oldest human rights organization, co-founded by Nobel Peace Laureate Andrei Sakharov, has been campaigning for the memory of victims of Stalin’s time and trying to face this period of oppression.
More than 12 million people were persecuted as “enemies of the people” from the late 1920s until Stalin’s death in 1953. Often, a “wrong” nationality, a Western-sounding name, or a higher level of education was enough to be arrested or executed or to disappear for many years, even decades, in one of the so-called gulags, prison camps of the Soviet regime.
Many of the victims were women. “Only a few had really been opposed to Soviet power,” says Irina Sherbakova, historian and curator of the exhibition. “Most of the time they were ordinary women—teachers, civil servants, housewives. Often women’s only fault was being the wife, daughter or sister of an ‘enemy of the people.’
“For example, during the Great Terror of 1937-1938 [Grande Terror foi o nome dado a uma sistemática campanha de prisões e execuções na antiga União Soviética contra supostos opositores de Stálin], more than 20,000 ‘wives of enemies’ were arrested in Moscow alone and sentenced to eight years or more in prison camps. More than 30,000 children were sent to children’s homes and in many cases they never saw their parents again,” says Sherbakova.
The fate of the children of the gulags, according to the curator, is a chapter in itself. “The infant mortality rate in homes was enormous, and the psychological trauma incurable.”
The exhibition was called “The Gulag’s Feminine Memory” because it was mainly women “who carefully guarded the memories of oppression,” she says.
In 1988, Sherbakova was one of the founders of the Memorial Foundation. “None of us thought then that the history of our country, of our society, would take this path”, he says, referring to the dissolution of the entity. She sees the reasons for the current situation, of “almost absolute lack of freedom”, in the fact that the crimes of the Stalin era have never been dealt with.
“To this day, our society is marked by Stalin’s terror: fear of authorities, double standards according to the principle ‘think one thing, say another, do a third’, encapsulation in a private ‘protective layer’, disinterest in everything that it’s social — it’s all the legacy of terror,” he says.
Repeatedly, the Russian judiciary has accused Memorial International of violating a 2012 law that allows the country to classify organizations that receive payments from abroad as “foreign agents”. Memorial has been considered a “foreign agent” in Russia since 2016 because it is partially financed from abroad. So a Moscow court decided to ban the human rights organization.
For Sherbakova, the decision came as no surprise: “We are the guardians of the memory of that part of history that the Russian state would prefer to forget, as it only wants to remember its achievements and victories.”
Anyway, the historian wants to continue her work. How it will do this remains unclear.
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