Memories of Nazi and Stalinist repression

EUROPE: BELARUS, UKRAINE, RUSSIA

Peter Coleman, Centre for Research on Ageing, University of Southampton, reports on progress of a project recording older people’s memories of Nazi and Stalinist repression in Eastern Europe funded by the German foundation EVZ ‘Erinnerung Verantwortung Zukunft’ (Remembrance Responsibility Future) and directed by Professors Andreas Kruse and Eric Schmitt at the Institute of Gerontology, University of Heidelberg. Data collection has been coordinated by Andrei Podolskij, Professor of Educational and Developmental Psychology at Moscow State University.
‘In the first phase of the project interviews have been conducted in Belarus, Ukraine and European parts of Russia commencing in 2009. A rich data set of considerable interest to oral historians has now been assembled. The interviewees were victims of two dictatorships, and up to the present day, in stark contrast to Soviet war veterans, no official remembrance has been provided for them. Therefore the aim of the work has been to make visible their sufferings and also their ability to have endured them.

Young researcher, Lilia Voronovskaya (Cherkassy State University), interviewing in Kovalyn, Ukraine. Photo: Yana Suprunrnko.

‘Despite the ever-decreasing number of survivors it was decided to go ahead with the project because in the words of a NGO representative in Belarus ‘one person can remember for forty others’. Having been ignored for seventy years an initial task was to reassure the participants of the genuineness of the interest in what they had experienced so many years previously. The emotional wearing down of both interviewee and interviewer as a result of the telling of long hidden events also had to be taken into account. But in general these older people proved eager to leave behind tangible records to inform future generations. The project has brought to light many atrocities which had previously been unrecorded, including the mass slaughter of more than 700 Jewish victims in German occupied Rostov-on-Don.

‘The study has shown that the older generation needs to feel that they are not forgotten. Yet it has proved hard to interest younger people in such memories. Previous initiatives taken to provide schools with oral history accounts have disappointingly discontinued. Therefore attempts were made to involve young people in the current project in two different ways. In the first, adolescents and young adults aged between thirteen and twenty-five years participated in a ‘Meeting Point – Dialogue’ exercise, providing various forms of support to older persons including with the use of computers. A second approach was to involve young psychology students (twenty-one to twenty-four years old) directly in the data collection in the Ukraine. One lesson learned is that, although younger people often do not want to hear about past sufferings, they are engaged by accounts of survival in extreme situations. They are curious to find answers to questions: how did you resist? how did you manage? There is also a strong latent interest in family history. Although Stalin may have been very successful in destroying horizontal links within families, vertical links remained in the remembered love of children for their parents who had disappeared.’
• Further information on possible access to transcripts of the interview material (some of which has been translated into English) can be obtained from Professor Podolskij at apodolskij@hotmail.com .

Sourse:
ORAL HISTORY, Spring 2013, pages: 27-28