By the spring of 2003, I had ongoing projects with a dozen families, but I desperately needed a research team to expand my work and put it on a more systematic footing. So it was a crucial breakthrough to receive two major grants, one from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the other from the Leverhulme Trust, in 2003. Without the generous support of these British institutions, it would have been impossible to write
Supported by these grants, I employed the Memorial Society in St Petersburg, Moscow and Perm to interview survivors of the Stalin years and collect their family archives for transcription and scanning. The choice of these three branches of Memorial was not difficult. They had an excellent record in oral history, although in many ways the work they did for me, with its emphasis on the inner world of the individual and family relationships, was different from the projects they had done before which focused on the history of the Gulag. They all had large and active memberships, from which our participants were largely drawn, although the three went well beyond their natural constituency (victims of repression) to involve a much broader range of families, including many that had done very well by the Stalinist regime. In St Petersburg and Moscow the main advantage was the relatively high proportion of educated families that had retained written documents. In Perm it was the fact that the city had remained outside the occupied zone during 1941–5, so that the memory of the Stalin period was not confused with the trauma of the war, as well as the large number of former exiles and Gulag prisoners in the population of this area, which was once full of labour camps and ‘special settlements’.
The team in St Petersburg was led by Irina Flige, whose clever insights and advice, as well as her criticisms, were invaluable to the project. I have enjoyed and learned a lot from working with Irina and will always remain in her debt. The rest of the team in St Petersburg was made up by Tatiana Kosinova, a sympathetic listener who, like Irina, somehow managed to get far more from her interviews than anybody could have expected; and Tatiana Morgacheva, who took interviews and organized the archives with great skill. Irina Flige and Tatiana Kosinova also led the expedition to Norilsk, and Irina travelled on her own to Moscow, Saratov, Petrozavodsk, Krasnoiarsk and Stavropol to conduct interviews and collect materials.
Alyona Kozlova led the Moscow team with calm authority, always giving thoughtful and intelligent advice. Irina Ostrovskaia, Olga Binkina, Natalia Malykhina and Alyona Kozlova conducted the interviews with great sensitivity, while Galia Buvina organized the archives with exemplary efficiency. I am deeply grateful to them all.
In Perm the team was organized by the able and enthusiastic Aleksandr Kalykh, assisted by Elena Skriakova, with interviews conducted by Robert Latypov, Andrei Grebenshchikov, Svetlana Grebenshchikova and Mikhail Cherepanov. I would like to thank them all, particularly Robert and Andrei, who did most of the interviewing, always producing interesting results, and wrote helpful commentaries.
A few words are in order on the methodology of the project. I made the selection of the families to be included in the project from a database assembled by the research teams through telephone interviews with more than a thousand people in total. My main concern was to ensure that the final sample was drawn from a representative social base (it would have been very easy to skew it towards the intelligentsia, especially in Moscow and St Petersburg) whilst sticking to the principle that every family should have some sort of archive to corroborate the testimony given during interviews. In Perm this was difficult. It is a region heavily populated by former ‘kulaks’, uprooted from their homes, and other victims of the Stalinist regime. The vast majority of the people interviewed by telephone had no personal documents at all (many did not even have a photograph of their parents). But those who did have family archives were well worth hunting out.
During the first interview, people were allowed to reconstruct their life-story with minimal intervention (a standard practice of oral history), although I prepared a questionnaire for the interviewers and asked them to develop certain themes that had emerged already from the database. These interviews were very long, usually lasting several hours and often stretching over several days. Having analysed the edited transcripts, I would then decide the main direction and set questions for the secondary interviews, which explored in depth specific themes. There were usually two or three interviews for every family. About once a month, I would meet the research teams to discuss the interviews and select the materials from the families’ archives for transcription and scanning. The selection of the archives was relatively straightforward: we took as much as possible – personal documents, diaries, memoirs, notebooks, runs of letters in their entirety – as long as these were written before 1960 or shed light on the Stalin period. In the interviews, by contrast, we encountered many challenges, most of which will be familiar to practioners of oral history in the former Soviet Union. Techniques had to be developed to get people to think more reflectively about their lives; to disentangle direct memories from received impressions and opinions; to see the past and recall what they had thought without hindsight; and to overcome their fear of talking to strangers. The gradual building up of trust was essential. It would often taken a dozen visits before precious documents were handed over to our teams for copying (portable scanners and digital cameras made it possible to do this quickly in the home).
I am deeply grateful to all the families who contributed to the project with Memorial. It is impractical to thank them individually (they are all named in the List of Interviews) but special thanks must go to Antonina Znamenskaia, Inna Shikheyeva, Marksena Nikiforova, Elizaveta Delibash, Angelina Bushueva, Valentina Tikhanova, Nina Feofilaktova, Maria Vitkevich, Marianna Barkovskaia, Georgii Fursei, Maria Kuznetsova, Yevgeniia Vasileva, Nikolai Kovach, Valentin Muravsky, Rada Poloz, Anzhelika Sirman, Zoia Timofeyeva, Nikolai Lileyev, Vladimir Piatnitsky, Lev Netto, Julia Volkova, Larisa and Vitalii Garmash, Maia Rodak, Galina Adasinskaia, Roza Novoseltseva, Veronika Nevskaia, Svetlana Khlystova, Vera Minusova, Nikolai Meshalkin, Elfrida Meshalkina, Leonid Saltykov, Dmitry Streletsky, Irina Mikueva, Rezeda Taisina, Liubov Tetiueva, Vera Vasiltseva, Natalia Stepantseva, Ivan Uglitskikh, Sofia Ozemblovskaia, Valentina Kropotina, Tamara Trubina and Vera Turkina, who all gave many hours of their time and precious documents to the project. I would also like to thank Elena Bonner, who was interviewed as part of the Memorial project by Irina Flige in Boston, for giving me permission to cite extracts from Antonina W. Bouis’s translation of her book
These people are the heroes of
At every stage of working on this book, I have been acutely conscious of my duty as a historian to tell these people’s stories in a way that they can recognize as a truthful reflection of their experience. There is no anonymous testimony in this book: with one or two exceptions, all the people who have given interviews or documents have agreed to have their names revealed. For this reason, sections of the later drafts were translated into Russian and given to the families concerned, so that they could make the necessary corrections and suggest alterations to the text. This was a long and complex process – not least because the way a person sees his own biography is often very different from the view of him that can be formed from a reading of his memoirs, letters, diaries and recorded words – but it was important that the subjects of this book should have a chance to correct it. There was no case where I was forced to change my overall interpretation, but many where my views were enriched and improved by the family’s input. A problem arose with just one family, the Shikheyevs (Gaisters): some members of the family took exception to the testimony of Inna’s older daughter, which was cut from the proofs on their request. Inna saw and corrected all the remaining Gaister passages but later closed her archive in Memorial. I would like to thank Zhanna Bogdanovich and Natalia Leshchenko for translating sections of the book into Russian; Irina Flige, Alyona Kozlova and Irina Ostrovskaia for checking the final drafts; Leo Viprinski for his generous and thoughtful assistance with the Slavin sections; and Aleksei Simonov, not just for correcting the English text on the Laskins and the Simonovs, but for showing me the need to think again about the enigma of ‘K.M.’
Most of the materials generated by the research project of
