Historical Memory in Russia: Irina Flige of 'Memorial' interviewed by Josephine von Zitzewitz
Exclusively for Pushkin House, academic Josephine von Zitzewitz, of UiT The Arctic University of Norway, interviews Irina Flige, director of the Memorial Research & Information Centre, St Petersburg. Irina was due to speak at Pushkin House in April as a joint event of the Pushkin Club and Rights in Russia, but the event was postponed due to the coronavirus lockdown. They speak about the legacy of political repression, and efforts to document it - and opposition to its documentation. Their conversation touches on why Memorial focuses on the material evidence of repression, and mentions topics such as the Sandormokh burial site, the case of Yurii Dimitriev, and newer projects. The recording is in Russian, but English subtitles will be added soon. In the meantime, a full English transcript is available here.
FULL English TRANSCRIPT:
Josephine von Zitzewitz: Here at Pushkin House, we had planned to welcome Irina Flige, the director of the Research and Information Centre Memorial, back in April. Unfortunately, the pandemic cancelled our plans and so today, Irina is talking to me from her home in St Petersburg. Most of you will know that Memorial is an organisation that researches the history of Soviet state terror – the history of the Gulag and the history of dissidence and resistance to totalitarianism. Irina Flige herself is a specialist on historical memory in Russia and the author of many publications on this topic.
Irina, please tell us, what does historical memory – the memory of the Soviet past and state terror – look like in contemporary Russia? What is this memory based on?
Irina Flige: Well, if I’m supposed to be serious, I would say that in Russia there is no such thing as historical memory. There are all kind of things. There is history politics. There are memory wars. There is a lot of inherited history. We are talking about a most peculiar, multifaceted construct in which memory, remembrance and present-day politics became very much entangled. And this means that the well-known term “historical memory” cannot really be applied to the situation in Russia. As a natural scientist I’m not overly prone to musing on whether this is good or bad. But what does it mean? There is no such thing as historical memory, and yet we are working with a traumatic past, that is, with the Soviet past, which is monstrous. We must be guided by something in our work because it is plainly impossible to say – although we do say it sometimes – that the Gulag and the terror are part of today rather than yesterday, that the past hasn’t been processed and that the Gulag continues to exist. In some sense it was possible to say that back in the 1990s, but now more than 30 years have passed since the beginning of what historiography calls Perestroika, or Perezagruzka [Rebooting, used ironically here]. It is plainly impossible to talk in the present tense about events that happened 50, 60, 80, 90 or 100 years ago. Consequently, today we need to choose the correct focus and define what it is that we are talking about. The thing we are talking about is in the past after all. I find that the most appropriate term we can use is “legacy”. Our legacy is that part of our history that we, living in Russia today, have inherited. And if we talk about the Soviet terror, the Gulag and resistance to the system as a legacy – about what kind of legacy it is, and about whether this legacy has been accepted or rejected – it all becomes very easy.
We can simplify the situation and talk about three distinct groups: those who inspired and organised the terror, those who fell victim to the terror and those who fought against the terror. If we then superimpose this scheme on contemporary society we end up with an astonishing picture. This legacy has indeed been accepted in full, but different elements have been accepted by different parts of society. The legacy of those who inspired the terror has been accepted by the contemporary Russian authorities, by the judiciary, and by the law enforcement agencies. They consider this legacy to be their asset. In what sense? In the sense that they have learned the lesson offered by the Soviet times. So they consider it normal to address the people – in fact, they don’t see “people” but “the population”; they don’t see “citizens” but “the population” – using the language of terror. Doing so means conducting government business in a successful manner. This is because they most important lesson they learned from the Soviet past is an axiom: the state, pursuing its own interests and desires, can do anything it possibly wants to any person. A human life and a human being’s rights have no value. This postulate forms the basis on which Russia is governed today. Most importantly, it does not concern merely the highest-ranking people in the administration – Putin, the members of the government – but every segment of the pyramid. It is passed down from one segment to the other, right down to the lower levels of the administration, and is put into practice there. It follows is that it is acceptable to beat protesters in the street and to jail people on political charges, because those in power have no sense of the value of a human life.
This is the first part of the legacy. The second part – also fully accepted – is the terrible one, and it affects the majority of people. The best name to describe this legacy is “victim complex”. It implies the experience of fear, a very serious, terrible fear which originates in the past and has reached the genetic level. Today, this fear is absolutely everywhere. Fear furnishes the bizarre readings we see during elections: 80% for Putin, 90%, 70%... The reason is in the structure of the victim complex, which presupposes loyalty – exaggerated, emphatic loyalty – no matter what happens. It feeds on an expectation of repression and terror that is present long before any repression actually happens. It means that people are expecting that those in power will do to them whatever they want. The idea that “I can’t go to a rally, I can’t go to a picket, because I will be arrested, beaten and tortured” hasn’t become a mass phenomenon yet, but fear already has.
And the third part of the legacy, also accepted, is the experience of resistance to a criminal regime. The Soviet regime was criminal – that was the essence of the regime from 1917 until its very end – and Putin’s regime is criminal, too. As a result, the experience of resistance to a criminal regime is also something we inherited from the past. At this point it is very important to understand what kind of resistance that was. Resistance was never a political experience, throughout the whole of Soviet history, if we disregard the first years after the October revolution and perhaps also the first years after the Civil War. But from about 1924 onwards there was practically no political resistance in the Soviet Union. There was a language of resistance that was political, but no political resistance as such. Resistance was first and foremost a moral and ethical stance. And it was the margin of despair. “I simply cannot” – that’s what a person who was prepared to join the resistance would say. Such moral and ethical form of resistance never pursued any political goals in earnest. And this is precisely the kind of resistance we can see in contemporary Russia. Opposition in contemporary Russia is not insubstantial, including civic protests as well as the creation of opposition parties, but these protests and programmes have practically no political agenda.
This is the entirety of what I have called “legacy”. In this legacy, the traditional European term “historical memory” becomes entangled with the past, with the present and with the way the legacy is realised today.
JvZ: The focus of Memorial’s work, and of your own work, is on material memory – on the traces which the terror and the Gulag left in the landscape and towns and cities of Russia, and on the public’s attitude to these traces. In fact, Memorial has created an amazing website, called The Virtual Museum of the Gulag, where visitors can see some of these traces, which include entire towns built by prisoners of the Gulag. Why is material memory so important for researchers? And what can it teach us?
IF: You see, the turn towards material memory didn’t happen accidentally. And perhaps if there weren’t such problems with memory on the verbal level we wouldn’t have started researching material memory, that is, the memory that is inherent in objects. I will talk about this in more detail later. First let me tell you why we don’t work with verbal memory. The problem is that even back in the years of the terror, during the Soviet era, there was no such thing as verbal memory. No language was ever created for talking and thinking about the events of the terror and the Gulag. It simply never developed. During these years people didn’t know what to call the thing they’d witnessed. They couldn’t name the phenomenon, and they didn’t talk about it. They were afraid to discuss it and would hide their biography. And in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many children whose parents had been arrested would give interviews and say things like: “They came and took our father away”, “When our mum was there...”, or “When our brother came back from there...”. All the key words used were placeholders: “they” is the NKVD; “there” means “in the camp”; “took away” was used instead of “arrested” or “imprisoned”. These placeholders testify to the fact that when the events happened, there was no language to describe them.
But – and this is also very important – in the place of this language there was the language of terror, which the authorities used for communicating with their citizens. Words like “enemies”, “traitors”, “saboteurs” etc. This language did exist. What is interesting is that this language wasn’t alien to the victims either. Many people would say, for example, “I’m an enemy of the people after all”. Yes, of course they meant it figuratively. Still, language does matter. “Yes, naturally, because we were the children of enemies of the people”. And this sarcasm, this tragism that is inherent to the language of terror does not promote understanding or overcoming of the legacy of terror and the Gulag. But sarcasm formed this new language, which is a pseudo-language. In the late 1980s and early 1990s it may have been possible to say that we saw a meta-language at work when a person, for lack of a language, mumbled “well... you understand....” when talking about their life, their life in the camps or their life before the arrest, or when children were talking about the arrest of their parents or their brothers and sisters. This was in fact a meta-language.
But after 1991, after the Law on the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression, the search for words and terms in which to describe all these events disappeared in a flash. And what emerged in its place came straight from the meta-language of terror, namely the term “repressed person”. Everybody breathed out and started saying: “I am a repressed person”, “my father was repressed” etc. This substitution is very clearly visible because “repression” – any kind of repression – is actually a legal term. It can be used to describe the arrest of thieves, murderers etc. The entire code of criminal sanctions taken together is called “repression”. And of course there are different kinds of penalties – the death penalty, labour camp terms, exile to remote places etc. The term “repression” denotes a whole complex of sanctions, and it doesn’t change depending on whether the state authorities are criminal or not. And here is a very interesting thing that happened with the Russian language: the term “repressed person” is used in one instance only, and it is identical with the term “rehabilitated person”. When this linguistic phenomenon entered Russian society, older people, who aren’t used to analysing new words quickly – and there were no other words, so they received the only words that existed – made it very obvious that the two terms are perfect synonyms. “Rehabilitated person” is a synonym for “repressed person”. Equality sign. Complete equality. This can be seen on the example of the many small public associations of former prisoners, exiles and their children who began calling themselves “Association of Rehabilitated Persons” or “Association of Repressed Persons”. “Association of Rehabilitated Persons” or “Association of Repressed Persons”.
So, everything came full circle – because a person can be rehabilitated only if they previously suffered repression. And if they are rehabilitated today, that means that they were repressed yesterday. That’s it – equality. This linguistic catastrophe requires a separate body of research, fascinating research on the dissemination of terms, the frequency of use and how the terms changed over time etc. To give one very simple example: during the 1920s, the term “political prisoners” denoted members of other socialist parties and anarchists who ended up in the camps. All the others who were in the camps were either “counterrevolutionaries” or ordinary criminals. Some time passed, and now it was the people convicted according to article 58 who are called “political prisoners”. All of them. There were no more counterrevolutionaries, and political prisoners – that was article 58. Of course I am talking about the terminology used inside the Gulag here, not outside of it. It’s really a very interesting topic that requires very serious scholarly efforts: how this language was formed. How it changed. How it was infiltrated by criminal jargon. What remained of it, and how it got outside the Gulag. And why today the entire country is using criminal jargon [blatnoi yazyk].Because that is the language we are using today: blatnoi. That is the language the Russian authorities are using today to talk to their citizens, and people are using it to communicate among themselves.
As a researcher I am interested first and foremost in the memory of the Gulag and of the terror, and so I simply began studying this memory. It is reflected in material culture in a very interesting way. And it doesn’t matter which part of material culture we take; moreover, material culture is convenient. In Russia we like to use an English proverb: “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” This is how material memory works, too: an object either exists or it doesn’t. There is nothing to make up. You can’t make up any meaningless terms. It either exists or it doesn’t. And if an object exists we can read what it contains, its message. Let’s begin with objects that people kept on purpose. Objects that were preserved specifically are what we call relics. They are the quintessence of memory – relics in general are the quintessence of memory.
What do relics from the camp time preserve? It turns out that the memory they preserved was very important to people. For example, writing utensils from the desk of somebody’s father who was later executed. These utensils became the final token of a normal world, because they used to lie on the father’s writing desk, and so signify that there was a time when the world was in order. Before the children’s home, before the catastrophe, before mum was arrested, before we were sent into exile... these objects are fragments of a world that was still normal. Such a fragment, such a token – “this is all we have left from my dad” – can be a drawing that a prisoner sent to his daughter. That’s not even a memory; it’s a token of love, a token of anticipation. It may have been the other way round – a prisoner preserved letters from home and drawings sent to him by his children, as tokens of love, of anticipation and respect. That’s one kind of token.
There are other interesting ones, too. For example, a spoon a woman brought back from the camp. We can look at this story very attentively – why did she bring the spoon back with her? Because in the context of the limited, hard everyday life in the camp this spoon had special significance – perhaps it was a present from a fellow inmate, because a spoon is a valuable thing to have in the camp. Perhaps it was passed on by somebody from the camp’s men’s section as a gift, a token of attention. There were many possible stories. Why this particular object was brought back; why the spoon was preserved even afterwards, when life had become normal once again, when the everyday life had become settled, in a bigger city, perhaps Moscow or Leningrad or Omsk. Yes, it was no longer being used, but it was there. And so on. Then there is all the embroidery, that’s a separate story. All these objects are in fact witnesses. They have their own biography. And because of that, a lot of work is needed in order properly to read these material messages – we must take interviews, ask people where the object is from etc.
Then there are objects that became witnesses only upon ending up in a museum. I won’t give any concrete examples now, but imagine, staff from the museum in the town of N-sk go to the taiga, find the ruins of a prison camp from the 1930s and start collecting objects – bars, a door with a peephole, bowls, mugs, everything that the soil preserved. They take all this to their museum and what begins then is simply ethnography: “there was a certain tribe called zeki [z/k, short for zakliuchennye, prisoners], they were common in such-and-such regions, there they would eat using these spoons, they were eating from these bowls, their doors all had peepholes and their windows had bars.” An ordinary ethnographic description of a certain tribe called zeki. And in that case our task is to decipher why some museums employ this kind of ethnographic model for their displays.
In any case, which models are used for understanding and perceiving the world of the Gulag? What’s this world about? When we look at literature we find two distinct camps. There is Solzhenitsyn and then there is Shalamov, and in their work they conduct an argument about the significance of the Gulag. Many people continue to cite these models. But museums have never compared Solzhenitsyn’s perception and world view with that of Shalamov. They never participated in this argument. They collected whatever they could. And when they had finished collecting items, they started to show them. And the question is – what are they showing? Are they showing the Gulag as a great building project, as the victory of man over nature, where a city emerged where no city could possibly have been before, where people were building factories and bridges and rivers and brought them to completion, and where all our victories were inspired by Comrade Stalin? In this case people were heroes of labour and it didn’t matter that they were prisoners. Or was the Gulag – following Shalamov – an obsolete, unnecessary experience, with inhuman conditions? None of this was needed; this was a way of humiliating and dehumanising people? Then this museum will showcase the horrors: emaciated prisoners, horrific drawings and so on.
When all the different objects, testimonies and concepts that we can see in different museums come together in virtual space, they start arguing among themselves. And by arguing they are expanding the scope of memory – the scope of this material memory. But material memory naturally also includes objects outside museums. Since our museum is online, the size of a given object makes no difference. It only needs to be a material testimony to either memory or to an event itself. And memory is more important. This is why we have a special section for monuments and memorials that have been erected over the last 30 years and continue being erected today, mostly to the victims of the Gulag and the terror and very rarely to resistance fighters – that’s a whole separate topic. And burial sites are part of our museum, too. They are also sites of memory that construct an experience of how to work through the past.
JvZ: Over the last years we have seen policies that are designed to suppress the memory of state terror during the Soviet time. A recent example: in the city of Tver two memorial plaques were removed from the building of the former KGB administration on the eve of Victory Day [i.e. 9 May]. One of them was dedicated to the executed Polish prisoners of war [who were killed during the Katyn massacre] and the other to Soviet citizens who suffered repression.
In this context the story of the memorial cemetery of Sandormokh in Karelia, is particularly sad. For a while now the authorities have been calling into question that those buried there are prisoners of the Solovetsky camp who were executed. For you, Sandormokh is a special place. And not long ago you published a great book, called Dramaturgiia smyslov. What is going on there, and why has this place in particular become the target of a state persecution campaign?
IF: You touched on many different topics here. So I will start with explaining the construct of contemporary political memory. You see, in Russia we talk a lot about a recent phenomenon – it’s not a mass phenomenon, but it involves more than a few people – that can be called “deniers”. Deniers are people who maintain that certain things didn’t happen. This is in fact a well-researched psychological phenomenon: some people insist that the earth is not round but flat. And in the field of history many stories of denial have emerged, too. They always look the same. With regard to Katyn, deniers will say, firstly, that the Polish officers were shot by the Germans rather than the Soviet authorities, secondly, that there weren’t any Poles at all, thirdly... and so on. This kind of cheap speculation. It’s a different matter when deniers become part of the mainstream of history politics and their actions and their vandalism are thus encouraged – encouraged by default, because nobody hired these people. They are probably very unhappy, but they ended up as part of the mainstream of present-day memory politics.
With regard to memory politics – that’s an artificial field. Its roots are in the creation of state ideology, and the state ideology – Putinism – is an utterly simple thing. “Russia has always been a great country. Yes, there was terror in Russia.” They don’t use the word “terror”, so they say “in Russia there were repressions.” “Yes, we are sorry about the victims. But we built a great country, we won the war, our Gagarin flew into space.” And this construction implies a most terrible thing – the rehabilitation of terror as such. Because the construction looks like this – “yes there was terror, yes there were victims, yes we are sorry for them, but we did...”. It is this “but” that enables the rehabilitation of terror. It means that the terror has become part of the norm of life, part of the norm for administering the country, part of the norm of state policy. This central component of state policy often leads to vandalism when implemented.
In the 1990s and 2000s Stalinism was the domain of only a few marginals. There was an incident in St Petersburg: somebody scribbled “They didn’t shoot enough” on the Solovetsky Stone, on the side with the inscription “To the Victims of Communist Terror”, but that was a marginal incident. Today this attitude is no longer marginal, and it exhibits a certain correspondence to the present-day public order. Interestingly, interest in the history of the terror and the Gulag has grown exponentially. This interest has become topical because it is grounded in present-day reality – in today’s arrests, today’s torture and today’s political trials. Today’s beatings in the street, today’s prohibition on demonstrations and rallies and even pickets by the opposition. These events give rise to the question “Explain to us what happened back then.” We at Memorial used to say – and we did so for a very long time, starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s – that we are looking into history and memory for the benefit of the future. But we were wrong. The demand to look into the past arises from the present day. First we become interested in contemporary society and then we ask how it all worked back then.
In this sense Sandormokh is a very topical and important site of memory, one of those multi-faceted places where many specific traits come to the forefront. I have written an entire book about how memory was constructed there and how it materialised. The materialisation of memory is a separate and very important aspect, describing the story of how a site of memory is created from an idea, a need, love and the desire to know the truth. And then how it is transformed, first in people’s own need rather than in a clear geographical sense. How at first it was the word – yes, the word – “Solovki” that became a site of memory. Then a list, then a document. That’s what the book is about.
But if we look at Sandormokh and the present-day front line going through it – and there’s a war going on there, an ordinary war – we can see that what is happening is not caused by denial. There is no denial in the sense of “there were no victims”. What is at work there is a new process, new in the sense that its origins are in present-day history. A process of hybridisation. You know, there are hybrid wars and there is hybrid memory. And Sandormokh is the place where some people are trying to create a hybrid form of memory. In any case Medvezhegorsk as both the capital of the BelBaltLag [the labour camp that built the White Sea – Baltic Sea Canal] and the town closest to Sandormokh provokes a hybrid kind of memory. But it used to provoke in a different way.
In Medvezhegorsk and in this part of Karelia, hybrid memory has existed before, in a very interesting form. On the one hand, people remember the crime that is called “The Great Terror” – the mass executions. That was a catastrophe and a crime committed by Stalin. On the other hand, the proximity of the White Sea Canal has given rise to a different kind of memory. The locals used to say “We built the White Sea Canal! What a great feat! A gigantic building project! That was the great Stalin.” Moreover, these two aspects were part of the same narrative and often told by the same person. You only needed to leave a short break and talk about the weather between asking the first question, “What do you think about Sandormokh?” and the second one, “What do you think about the White Sea Canal?” Then you would get the second narrative about the great victory of Stalin over the wild element of the great Canal. This is how the pieces fit together and how this hybridity works; it has always been there.
What is happening now is different. Even the Russian Military History Society wouldn’t insist that no terror victims are buried in Sandormokh. On the contrary, they say “they are definitely there. But if we dig somewhere nearby then we will find our heroes, too.” So what we can see are attempts to devalue memory on the one hand and to make it hybrid on the other. Memory needs to become hybrid in order to lower the site’s standing. I am no political scientist of course, but it seems to me that hybridity is a fairly new phenomenon in contemporary history. Hybrid wars are of the same nature: there is a war and at the same time there is no war. The same thing is happening in Sandormokh, when some actors construct the memory of POWs who are allegedly buried in the place that was previously seen to hold the remains of 6,241 people who were shot in 1937-1938. This kind of parallel. Another aspect is the official impulse: the Military History Society is an absolutely official organisation whose director is the Minister of Culture.
Alongside the attempt to officially discredit a special site of memory, a parallel process is attempting to change the site’s role from the standpoint of civil society. In my book “Sandormokh, Dramaturgy of Meanings” I describe the mechanisms by which the annual memory event changes from one year to the next. It is persistently acquiring new meanings, meanings that are particular to the present day. Look at what happened. In 2014, when Russia began the war in Ukraine, at the annual rally [in Sandormokh] people naturally began talking about the legacy of crime. And that the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass constitute systemic crimes committed by the present-day authorities. All the while the systemic crimes of the Soviet authorities resulted in us standing before the graves of people who were executed back then. And two years later, after the arrest of Yurii Dmitriev, we naturally began talking about Dmitriev’s arrest as a crime and a political, fabricated case, and we uttered words of support for him. And by today, two more years later, the meaning of this action has become clear – today and yesterday are coming together in this point.
As a result, what now happens in Sandormokh on 5 August is simultaneously the fulfilment of our obligations before the memory of those who were killed 80 years, more than 80 years ago, and an act of solidarity with the political prisoners of today. And during this rally, and during the memorial ceremony, a group that supports political prisoners bring postcards and everyone who came for the Memorial Day on 5 August – and that can be 300 or 400 people – writes postcards addressed to present-day political prisoners. So it has all come full circle. At the same time, the Russian authorities have taken a step aside. They are no longer interested in Sandormokh and no longer participate in the Memorial Day events. They no longer lay wreaths or visit the memorial cemetery. As a result, Sandormokh indicates the victory of civic memory today. In this place it became clear that civic memory is a lot stronger than we could have imagined, and also how much it is linked to the past. We see the connection between the civic memory of the past and that of today.
JvZ: You already mentioned Yurii Dmitriev. It is impossible today to talk about Sandormokh without mentioning this case. Yurii Dmitriev is a historian and the director of Memorial in Karelia. He was part of the group that found the burial site in Sandormokh in 1997. For four years now he has been subject to reprisals on a charge that is clearly political. His initial acquittal has been overturned, and during the corona crisis the prosecution has denied him bail on health grounds. Why did Dmitriev become such a symbolic figure whose fate continues to preoccupy the academic community in Russia and abroad? Could you tell us in more detail?
IF: You are asking the right question, but there is no answer – that is the problem. Because we don’t understand, we simply don’t know why Dmitriev was arrested. Perhaps there will come a time when we will have access to their archives, or to certain documents, and then we will find out on whose orders he was arrested and for what reason. This is why I am simply unable to provide an answer to this kind of question. I don’t know why Dmitriev was arrested. Or why they arrested Dmitriev rather than somebody else.
But back in the 1970s I had an amazing friend who served a seven-year sentence according to article 70, anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, and when people asked him afterwards why he had been arrested he usually replied “I don’t know, I didn’t arrest myself.” You see, that reply is correct. To the point and correct. So, paraphrasing my friend, let me tell you – I don’t know for what reason they arrested Dmitriev. I mean, why. What do we know? The charges are horrible and clearly fabricated. And while we don’t know why Dmitriev was arrested, we know that he did nothing wrong, on the contrary, he did many good things. He compiled an excellent Book of Memory for Karelia. No other region in Russia can boast such an excellent, detailed, well-researched and thorough Book of Memory as Karelia. But the conflict between the individual and the state is inevitable, and that’s the bad thing. Yes, they seized him in a completely unthinkable, vice-like grip.
At some point later, when the Dmitriev Affair becomes the subject of historical research, it might be possible to understand all the mechanisms behind it. But let me tell you, it’s not all that interesting. That’s already what I’d call historical curiosity. At the moment we are seeing a struggle for the life and health of our colleague, and many honest and respectable people are participating in this struggle. We are very grateful to everybody who wrote letters of support and collected signatures. It really means a lot – whether it will have an impact on the decision taken by those criminals who sit in court and conduct the case I don’t know. It could have an impact or not, but that doesn’t mean that this support isn’t needed. This support is very much needed, and I hope that sooner or later the case will be won because this is a case of the people versus the state. It’s not just Yura against a trumped-up charge. It’s society against a criminal state.
JvZ: It’s clear that non-commercial organisations in Russia are finding it very hard to work right now. They are under increased pressure from the authorities, and now the pandemic has added to that. Could you tell us what your work looks like today? What activities are possible today? Of course, we are all creating virtual content at the moment – what is Memorial doing in this respect?
IF: I don’t think that the pandemic has affected Memorial, the Iofe Foundation and our informational resources any worse than anybody else. I sometimes think that it is indecent to complain about the pandemic because there are very many people for whom the pandemic and the lockdown have been a catastrophe. People who can’t work from home for a number of reasons, because of the kind of work they do. We have been far less affected in this regard. Unfortunately we cannot host any of the varied and interesting public events we normally organise, but we are doing events on Zoom. We are becoming familiar with the new technologies; we have published a few podcasts as an experiment and decided to further develop this field of activity even after the pandemic. Once again, the pandemic has created no specific problems for Memorial. It’s indecent to complain – after all, who likes sitting in isolation, nobody likes that. We’ve been able to transfer all work with archival materials to a home working format because there was a lot of material that had been scanned but not yet processed, and research activities have been adapted to the distance formal as well – so, we will get through the pandemic.
JvZ: Please tell us about the project “Islands of Freedom” [Ostrova svobody] – what is it? I’ve been seeing posts on Facebook advertising it.
IF: That is probably our favourite project at the moment – because it is at the stage where newborn ideas are first put into practice. I think it’s an amazing project, with many merits. First of all because it is linked to the map of the city of St Petersburg, like some other of our projects. While our projects on monuments and burial sites are linked to the map of the country as a whole, this project is linked to the map of our city. In the case of Petersburg the name “islands” contains a playful element, because there are many islands here – so there are “islands of freedom” and then there are “islands of unfreedom”, denoting the sites where people were arrested. The title “Islands of (Un)Freedom” unites all events in virtual space that have a link to protest activities – we show, for example, a place where people met for a demonstration or scattered flyers, or the inscription “Brezhnev get out of Prague” on the parapet of the Annichkov Bridge. We show where these events happened on the map of the city and link them to informational materials, interviews, and essays written for the project, often by those who were involved in the events themselves. Our latest “proud achievement” are several topics prepared by students of the Higher School of Economics. The students developed material on individuals participating in protest and wrote essays, and there are archival materials, videos and other items linked to each topic, so we have a very lively project going on there and I think it has a great future.
JvZ: Thank you Irina for the very interesting conversation!
Josephine von Zitzewitz is an academic and translator specialising in later Soviet and contemporary Russian poetry. She is a trustee of Rights in Russia, a member of the committee of the Pushkin Club, and a member of the steering committee and jury of the Pushkin House Translation Residency. She is author of the forthcoming monograph The Culture of Samizdat (Bloomsbury, 2020).