"We were in a big hurry, and we tried very hard, but the forces were already very unequal. Our support was growing, though. People also realised the threat much more than in the 1990s. We were supported at all sorts of rallies. ‘Reading of the names of the executed’ at the Lubyanka Stone was held annually since 2010 on 29 October. Every year it became more and more crowded, and already in recent years people stood for four or five hours in a queue to read one name: in the rain, in the snow. It seemed an utterly unbelievable act of resistance to oblivion. The Memorial was declared a foreign agent in 2014, first our Human Rights Centre, then in 2017 the International Memorial. This made the work increasingly difficult. Also for me personally: the school competition became one of their main targets and irritants. There were many stories on television where I was portrayed as one of the main enemies who fights patriotism and teaches schoolchildren with foreign money so-called Western values, but in fact revision of history. This has happened more than once and more than twice. Correspondents from vile programmes were on duty at the Memorial, popping out of the bushes with their questions: ‘Who pays you the money?’ It was all on television. There were searches. Not only in houses. It was all one big crap. My husband was detained at demonstrations. Even though he was older than me, he was left overnight in police custody, given fines. But the young got it much worse. Still, I would never leave the country, even when the Memorial was liquidated by the Supreme Court, which was a terrible sign for everyone - no one expected that such an old and well-known organisation would be liquidated. But when the war started, it became immediately clear why - they were clearing the field for themselves."
"All sorts of changes started, perestroika. I already knew different people, or they had heard about me. I took part in the first founding conference of Memorial. First there was a preparatory conference at the end of 1988, then the founding conference in 1989. And I knew people, of course, the so-called ‘foremen of perestroika’ from Yuri Karjakin to Ales Adamovich - all were friends of my father. He, too, became very involved in these processes. Father, mother, all of us, it was an absolutely fantastic time for us, and my parents, of course, went to all the huge Moscow demonstrations with us. My little daughter, who was two years old, sat on my husband's shoulders, and with that she went into life. Well, when Memorial began to formalise itself into an organisation, I found myself drawn into the process. So, in a sense, my experience was quite rare. Arseny Roginsky, who became chairman of Memorial, and who also played quite a big role in my life, also recorded the stories of former Gulag prisoners. But still, he was more into collecting archives. Mine was the experience of oral history - it was unique in a way. I was the first to do it so purposefully, for many years. Recently, even Oleg Orlov recalled it in an interview: how the Memorial began, and that they gathered in some basement and I told them what these people remembered, how they remembered and how they told it to me."
"Yes, that's why it so happened that ‘The Gulag Archipelago’, literally the first copies that came out, it was on very thin paper, almost transparent. And I was a nursing mother. It was the very beginning of the winter of 1973. My mum gave it to me - I'm a very fast reader, and I was reading then - anyway, my mum gave it to me for twenty-four hours, and I read it very quickly. There's a funny story connected with it, but I don't have time to tell it. Anyway, I realised that it interests me, and that I think I've sometimes heard differently from women of my grandmother's friends who survived the Gulag. It interested me, and because I was interested, and I had to ask people, and talk to them. And then I read some more books like that, it wasn't direct oral history, but there was a book by an Austrian journalist, Maxi Wander, who recorded women's stories about their fates. And I thought that's something that I really should have done, at least with the grandmother friends that I knew. And who I didn't think would write memoirs themselves. Later they started writing memoirs, by the way. But how I would write it down or record, was not clear to me. In general, I received a gift, an indirect gift from Solzhenitsyn. It was the very end of 1979, and Elizabeth Markstein gave me or brought me a Philips, a white Philips, it's in the museum at the exhibition now. And as soon as I had it in my hands, it meant freedom for me. And I started recording with this Philips: for ten years, in fact, until perestroika, I went around and visited different people. Sometimes I didn't have time for a few months, because it was Soviet life, I had children, and I had to earn money, of course: I earned money by translating, I earned money by interpreting, and I earned money by giving lessons. I took care of myself, just like everyone in Soviet times."
Irina Scherbakova is a university professor in Russia and Germany, expert in German studies, translator, specialist in oral history, human rights activist and public figure. She was born on 14 May 1949 in Moscow. She graduated from the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University as a philologist-Germanist, defended her PhD thesis on Germanic studies, translated from German language, in particular the short stories of Franz Kafka. Since the late 1970s, she has been recording oral memoirs of former Gulag prisoners on her own initiative. In 1988, she became one of the founders of the Memorial NGO, directed youth educational programmes, and for 20 years held an annual competition for schoolchildren entitled ‘Man in History. Russia-XX century’. Since 1991, she has been working in the KGB archives: she studied Soviet special purpose camps on German territory after 1945. She worked as an editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta and wrote for Moskovskie Novosti. From 1992-2006 she taught oral history and visual anthropology at the Russian State University for the Humanities. In 1994-1995, she lectured on oral history at the Scientific Board of Berlin. From 1998-2009 she taught at the Institute of Humanities in Vienna, and was a visiting professor at the Universities of Salzburg, Bremen, and Jena. In March 2022, she left Russia together with her husband after the outbreak of the war unleashed by the Russian Federation against Ukraine. Now she is a visiting professor at the Imre Kertész College of the University of Jena. Member of many academic scientific councils and board of directors, notably co-chair of the board of directors of the revived ‘Memorial. Future’ organisation in Germany. Awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and various prices, including the Moscow Helsinki Group Prize for the development of human rights awareness among young people.
