Podcast Then & Now #24 - Teresa Cherfas in conversation with Irina Shcherbakova [Part 1]

Welcome to the twenty-fourth edition n of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas. There is a well-known saying from the late Soviet period: “Russia is a country with an unpredictable past”. It resonates anew, this time in Putin’s Russia. My guest today is Irina Shcherbakova, a historian, who has been associated with the Russian grass-roots organisation “Memorial” since its foundation in 1988. After graduating from the Faculty of Philology at Moscow State University in the 1970s, she worked in the field of oral history, collecting the testimonies of victims of Stalinism. Through her work, Irina Shcherbakova has gained a deep understanding of how first the Soviet and later the Federation of Russia’s regimes’ interpretation of Russian history has changed over the years. From glasnost in the Gorbachev era, when Memorial was founded, to the present day, the past in Russia has indeed been “unpredictable”. It is about this and other more personal matters that I hope to talk to our guest today.

This podcast was recorded on 10 October 2024.

My questions:

• Tell us a little about yourself. Who were your parents? What moral guidelines or role models did you take with you from your childhood?
• Back in the 1970s, you began collecting the testimonies of victims of Stalinism. How did you find people who were willing to talk back then? What was the most important thing for you personally that you learned in the course of your research? How easy was it to do this work in Soviet times before glasnost and when the memory of the Stalinist era was still very fresh?
• How did it happen that you became one of the founders of “Memorial”? What were the goals that you and your co-founders hoped to achieve in setting up the organisation?
• At what point, in addition to researching Stalinist repressions, did “Memorial” become actively engaged in contemporary events? Was this during the Yeltsin era?
• What is your attitude to lustration? Should it have been carried out in the early 1990s in your opinion?
• On the theme of what more could have been done after the collapse of the Soviet Union, people often talk about the need to give a ‘legal assessment’ of historical events or to hold a tribunal to judge Stalin’s crimes. What do you think about this, and is such a process possible in the future?