After our meeting at FHM on Thursday, we went to the Museum of the History of the Gulag. For us this was a preparation for our visit on Friday to the Memorial Human Rights Centre.
The Gulag Museum was relocated and reopened last year and it is a sobering experience to walk through the exhibits and, in my case, to listen to the audio descriptions of the various areas. I read a BBC News report about the reopening of the Museum which pointed out that recent Government policy has been to play down Stalin’s record of terror and instead speak more about his role in defeating Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War. This is not to say the terror did not happen, just that the blame was not all at Stalin’s door. This seems to me to be a sensitive subject and I was not ready on this visit to raise it with anyone.
On Friday morning we went to visit representatives of the Memorial Human Rights Centre. With regard to the Gulag Museum, Memorial told us that they had provided the bulk of the archive material and exhibits but I got the impression that that was the extent of the contact.
I had heard of Memorial’s historical work when I learnt about Perm-36, a museum created on the site of a forced labour camp outside Perm, a city I have visited three times. As I understand it, and I could be mistaken, Perm-36 used to be a Memorial project and we learnt that now it is administered by local government. Again, I felt unable to pursue this further on this occasion but I am going to make some enquiries. I think, and again I could be wrong, that one difficulty is that Perm-36 housed nationalist prisoners from former Soviet states and the recent upheavals in these states make this faxt an uncomfortable one. In holding up Perm-36 as an example of Soviet repression it might be thought that the aforementioned nationalist prisoners were seen with sympathy as they had been imprisoned there.
Memorial is a human rights organisation, an historical museum and archive, and an educational forum. They work within the states of the former Soviet Union and, as laid out in their Annual Report 2013-14, their human rights work covers; identifying and documenting human rights abuses, distributing information about human rights abuses, providing legal aid to victims, representing victims in domestic and international courts, writing reports and analysis and presenting these at meetings in Russia and abroad.
The historical archive and the educational programmes serve to keep alive the memories of the victims of the Gulag and to show younger generations that the time of terror is part of the history of Russia. Remembering helps to ensure that it cannot happen again. Young people visit Memorial and engage in educational programmes and study exhibitions like “Art and Everyday Life in the Gulag”.
During our visit we were shown precious archive material which had been lovingly preserved by families of those in the camps, such as a note written on a flimsy cigarette paper and thrown from a train window in the hope that it reached the recipient. It did!
In contrast to this single testimony we were told of the largest collection of letters in the archive; thousands of letters, delivered to the Memorial office in three trunks, written by Lev and Svetlana Mishchenko during their fourteen years separation, first by his being in the army during the Great Patriotic War and then by his time in the Gulag. Lev sent the letters Svetlana wrote to him back to her so that a detailed record could be kept. British historian, Orlando Figes has chronicled their story in ‘Just Send Me Word’.
Memorial has been under threat for the past few years as it was considered to be a ‘foreign agent’ as it receives money from overseas for its work. A list of supporters includes the Embassies of Great Britain, France and the Netherlands as well as Amnesty International. One of our group spotted a donor he’d heard of and it gave him pause for thought but I think I’ll check out the donor groups which are unfamiliar to me, just for interest.
I believe that Memorial does great work and the staff we met are certainly committed. As we were leaving we saw boxes of candles and were told that on the following Saturday there would be a vigil in Moscow where the victims of the Gulag would be remembered with the lighting of candles and the reading out of names.
A fitting memorial.
Live Adventurously 