It was just ten years ago. I was in Moscow that wanted to show its distance from the communist past by exhibiting rows and rows of luxury boutiques defended at the door by robust guardians, when a friend, Marta Dell’Asta, took me to visit the headquarters of Memorial, the NGO founded in 1989 by Soviet dissidents.
I suddenly entered another world: an apartment – perhaps two or more apartments joined together – small rooms all full of books and folders of documents, of old desks where older women and men sat, dressed, or perhaps it is better to say wrapped up, very modestly. Clouds of smoke, full ashtrays and everywhere cups of tea, which we too were offered immediately. No, it didn’t look like a cold NGO defending abstract human rights, but rather a publishing house, or the editorial office of a newspaper, where at any moment we could meet Dostoevsky or Florensky. In the last room, a display case collected some objects, the last memories of known characters who died in the gulag or were killed in cold blood. It seemed to me that I encountered the last testimony of the Russian soul.
They explained to me how they had managed to collect much of the immense database of the regime’s victims, of Stalin’s crimes: a heritage accumulated in those poor rooms. Mild, modest-looking women had been hired as archivists at Lubianka when she first opened her archives – then promptly closed. These willing archivists – who obviously were forbidden from releasing documents and news – would go out every evening with a small booklet of documents hidden under their dress, challenging not slight penalties, and took them to this apartment where an old photocopier reproduced them all night long. . The next morning the documents returned to their place. The one who told these stories was Arsenij Roginskij, who in 1987 had been one of the founders of Memorial and for thirty years his brain, his heart and his engine. His father had died in a concentration camp, they don’t know when and where, he himself had been locked up in a concentration camp for four years, he had always fought, as he said, “for the truth in history”, convinced that this could constitute an instrument of liberation . When he died, in 2017, he already saw the signs that would lead to the end of his creature, but he bravely argued: “We didn’t win, but without us it would be worse”.
As I looked around me, among files and papers written in Cyrillic incomprehensible to me, my eye fell on an old filing cabinet full of portraits of faces in the foreground. They were mug shots of death row inmates, taken shortly before their execution. Many feelings were condensed in their eyes, almost an unspoken cry; in some cases a profound peace. Women and men shocked by the sudden, extreme catastrophe that was falling upon them, ordinary citizens – teachers, housewives, workers, tramps, priests – who in the years of the Stalinist Great Terror had been arrested and accused of the most improbable crimes, condemned and shot in a few days. The faces of the people photographed belong to some of the 20,765 innocents who, between August 1937 and October 1938, were shot and buried in the town of Butovo, near Moscow. A few years later, a district of dachas was built on their graves for the holidays of party leaders, still inhabited today by those who perhaps have forgotten – or would like to forget – everything.
It’s an awkward memory, even for the real estate market. But as long as Memorial retains these faces, it cannot be forgotten. And whoever has seen them cannot forget them. This is why Marta and I have collected them in a book, which I know of as the only Memorial document in Italy.
Today the leaders of the closed NGO are trying until the last moment to digitize all the documentation, and much of the material collected will be saved. But that last piece of Russia that remained among the old desks, among the elderly archivists who had bravely smuggled the documents under their clothes will not be saved: the soul of Memorial.
But the evils are not all here. Does not this violent erasure of memory hide some disturbing similarities with that cancel culture which requires the demolition of statues and the formation of purified school curricula by authors considered incorrect? A type of cancellation that is rampant in democratic countries and to which we are quickly succumbing. Perhaps, we can’t even count on a Roginsky to save us. –
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