Rather quietly over Christmas, files belonging to the Memorial project have been raided by the Russian police. This worrying development has seen the Russian state intervene to obstruct the ground-breaking oral history project, which has interviewed thousands about life in Stalinist Russia. This has raised many (and answered some) interesting epistemological issues about knowledge and authoritarian regimes, but also revealing parts of the past which had been unrecoverable, and will soon be permanently lost as the witnesses and actors age. No dry academic research centre, Memorial (in English) blends human-rights advocacy and humanitarian undertakings with historical research.
Malcolm
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Professor Orlando Figes recently teamed up with Memorial to investigate memories of Stalin's Russia.
Prof. Figes website www.orlandofiges.com contains a large variety of documents including photographs and interviews (in Russian)from individuals who volunteered in the project. The website also contains soundclips of two radio programs produced on this topic, which are extremely interesting.
'The Whisperers' is the name of the book published as a result of these findings. However,for a slightly more concise (but still fascinating) version see :
O. Figes, ‘Private Life in Stalin’s Russia: Family Narratives, Memory and Oral History’, History Workshop Journal, 65 (2008).
It extremely harrowing to note that the current Russian administration finds it necessary to sanction the invasion of a charitable organisation's archives for their own political agenda. The work that Memorial has undertaken in the recent past has been of huge importance for dissident groups in the Soviet Union, and for survivors of the GULAG. This is not the first time that the current administration has felt the need to stop the work of academics. It effectively closed down the European University at St Petersburg in 2008, some blaming their research into fair elections for the closure. As Marie has mentioned, Memorial’s recent work with Professor Figes has been at the cutting edge of research into history of human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. I hope this violation of academic freedom does not escalate further.
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