Remembering the repression of the Stalin era in Russia: on the non-transmission of family memory

Abstract

Research into some 30 families has revealed blank spaces in the history of many of these families, most of which date from the Stalin period. My thesis is that the internal policy of the Soviet state, with its repression and stigmatization of victims and their families, contributed to making certain pages of Soviet history disappear from family memories, or be reinterpreted within these memories. The policies of physical and symbolic stratification of the new “communist” society and stigmatization of broad social groups tended to create a gap between the social outcasts and their families. Families were impelled to “purge” their past and to eliminate the elements that could make them discreditable: to change names, surnames, and fathers’ names, to destroy the documents and photographs containing information about repressed people and to forget relatives lost from sight in the political turmoil. With the disappearance of eyewitnesses, firsthand memories that had not been transmitted to subsequent generations fell out of family history. These memory omissions result in these pages of family history being entirely wiped out, or lead to fragmented and impersonal memories.

Keywords:

• family memory
• repression
• stigmatization
• memory transmission

Notes

From a sociological point of view, the notion of “social construction” does not always mean an intentional action but a process through which different phenomena emerge as the effect of a concrete social context. The consequence of this process might be neither desired nor foreseen by individual actors or institutions. For further reading on constructivist sociology, see Berger and Luckmann (1966).

I believe that the lack of firsthand family memories stimulates the interest of certain social groups in organizations like Memorial whose primary task is to collect testimonies of repression.

I use the ISO 1995 transliteration standard for all Russian words except those that already have a conventional transliteration.

By the late 1920s, the groups defined as “class enemies” were: the kulaks (rich peasants); the “nepmen” (entrepreneurs of the period 1921–1928, named for the NEP or New Economic Policy); and the priests. In 1930–1931, during dekulakization, about 1,800,000 people were deported. The period 1937–1938 is usually referred to as the “Great Purges” or the “Great Terror.” Some 1,575,000 people were arrested; 85.4% of them were condemned; 51% of the condemned were executed (Werth 1997). These purges particularly affected the upper urban classes. Three of the country's five marshals were executed (Il'in 1996, 114–115); the same occurred with 80 of the 175 members of the High Military Council (Il'in 1996, 114–115), 13 of the 15 army commanders (Werth 1997), 50 of the 57 commanders of the army corps (Werth 1997), and 154 of the 186 division commanders (Werth 1997). About 90% of generals and 80% of colonels were affected by the repression (Il'in 1996, 114–115). Of the 10 members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Party that were in office in 1934, only 6 remained in 1939 (Il'in 1996, 114–115). By early 1941, the incarcerated population had reached 1,930,000 people, with “political” prisoners accounting for one-fourth to one-third of this number (Werth 1997). The Second World War (1941–1945) was also marked by the deportation of peoples suspected of collaboration with Hitler: over 1 million Soviet Germans, 200,000 Crimean Tatars, 400,000 Chechens, 100,000 Ingush, 140,000 Kalmyk, and others (Werth 1997). The war was followed by a new wave of political repression and stigmatization of the populations of the formerly occupied territories. In 1949, a struggle against “cosmopolitanism” was announced, the first anti-Jewish campaign of the regime.

Many Soviet citizens wrote to the authorities trying to get their rights reinstated (Alexopoulos 2003, 7); but for the most part, these letters can hardly be defined as a “voice” because in the majority of cases they did not have the desired effect.