Translated material
Communalla from the group "Death of Beria!"
Heroes of the documentary video project "Memorial" - former Stalin prisoners, exile, dispossessed and their children
"Gulag: People and Fate"-this is the name of the new project of the scientific and information center "Memorial" in St. Petersburg. The repressed and their children recall the camps, links and the endless expectation of a meeting with relatives.
In 2011-2012, the Memorial employees, together with the documentary director Alexander Slobodsky, recorded in St. Petersburg, Moscow, the Komi Republic and the Omsk region an interview with former prisoners, their children, former exile and dispossessed. The interview, the personal belongings of these people and the materials of the Gulag virtual museum formed the basis of the project on the repressed and their fates.
“For many years we have been collecting interviews with children of those who have suffered from political repressions, or those who went through camps or links themselves,” says the project curator of the project Yevgeny Kulakov in an interview with Radio Radio. -In recent years, we began to record our interviews on the video, there were a lot of them, we had to do something with them. And so we invited the documentary director Alexander Slobodsky and made 15-minute video portraits from large, almost three-hour conversations. As long as we got five of them, we present them in the "Memorial". We wanted people to be different. Among our heroes are a folklorist, ethnographer Elena Nikolaevna Razumovskaya from St. Petersburg, teacher Valentina Buyanova from the village of Takomik Omsk Region. All of them make accents on the moments of life that are important for these people, and each has their own accents. But everyone unites everyone - these are stories about wonderful people met in the camp or in exile, about human kindness and mutual assistance.
Kommunell Moiseevna Markman, having just graduated from school, entered the underground organization "Death of Beria!". For this, Communal Markman was sent to the Far North for 25 years
My beloved heroine of these interviews is Kommunell Moiseevna Markman. Now she lives in Moscow, and in the middle of the forties she lived in Tbilisi and, having just graduated from school, joined the underground organization "Death of Beria!" Together with their former classmates. She was the only girl there. For this, Kommunell Markman was sent to the Far North, Into, for 25 years: she stayed there for only eight years and went out under amnesty. It was very interesting for me to communicate with her, she was a poet, told how poetry helped in the camp, how she came up with a way to memorize them, carrying a car back and forth. It is perhaps the most striking example of resistance and optimism for me. However, she does not believe that she was arrested for nothing. Her father in 1937 was shot for anything, and her case was active resistance to the regime, ”said Evgenia Kulakova.
Among the heroes of the project "Gulag: People and Fate" - pensioner Ivan Schmidt from the Komi Republic ; Artist Yevgeny Ukhnalev , founder of the guild of heraldic artists, chief architect of the Hermitage. He says that he felt the Leningrad boy when he got into Vorkuta, how difficult it was to take out drawings from the camp and what to return to where he conducted youth in prison.
At school, in the second grade, I went to the board with other children whose fathers died in the war, and in gratitude from the state who killed my father, I received a washing gum
“I am a typical representative of my generation, my father spent 25 years in camps and links,” says St. Petersburg Elena Razumovskaya about her father Nikolai Bogomyagkov. - When I was little, my mother lied to me that my father died in the war, went missing. I remember in school, in the second grade, I went to the board with other children whose fathers died in the war, and in gratitude from the state who killed my father, I received a washing gum or something else like that. So I lived in ignorance under the age of 13, and suddenly my mother said that I have a dad, that he would go in our city - to see me and meet me. He was an extraordinary man, I immediately became attached to him, fell in love with him.
After the camp, my father had no right to live in Leningrad. In the first specialty, he was a historian, and in the camp he acquired another specialty, a planning of forestry. That's how he worked in different timber industry enterprises, and my mother and I came to him on vacation in the summer and winter. So it was, until Stalin died, then the dad was rehabilitated, although not immediately. He entered the housing cooperative and returned to Leningrad. And when he was taken away, he was the director of the Rabfak at the Elektrosil plant, a history teacher and director, and worked in the famous " Republic of Shkika " before the rabfak. When they began to arrest and shoot the leadership of the Electrosyle, he realized that he had to urgently leave. He quit and recruited to the Far North, from there, from the Murmansk region, and they took him.
He was special, no one had such a dad. Many fathers were sitting, but all of them were silent about it, and I certainly knew: I was a chosen person. It was unusually interesting with my father, he fed me with interesting Siberian stories, because he was an Transbaikal Cossack by birth. For the rest of his life, he wrote the history of the Transbaikal Cossacks, and how the Bolsheviks destroyed this Cossacks. He sat in historical archives, libraries and collected materials for his great study, some of which were published in Tamizdat, in the historical almanac of Memory. Then this almanac was renamed the "past."
The father was a literary gifted person, wrote essays and stories about his camp life. I collected part of these materials and also published in the "past", after the death of my father, ”said Elena Razumovskaya.
The Memorial publishes all five video portraits in the public domain so that they can be watched online and use for a variety of purposes, for example, in school lessons.