Historical memory, and the work with historical witnesses and testimonies, has been one of the central themes of Memorial’s work throughout its existence. Memorial, an international human rights organisation and historical society, continues this work today – now in exile. In contemporary Russia, the issue is no longer simply one of suppressing, forgetting, or ignoring the past. Whereas only a few years ago it was still possible to speak primarily of nostalgia for the Soviet past, today we are witnessing the active construction and dissemination of new myths about the Soviet era, including around the figure of Stalin.

In this situation, the historical witness acquires particular significance. A witness is not simply someone who remembers and tells the story of what they experienced, but a point at which personal memory meets collective forgetting and official interpretations of history. What happens to testimony when a society stops listening to it? How does the memory of political repression survive, and how is it transmitted to younger generations? And how does the Soviet past shape the perception of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine?

In this talk, Irina Scherbakova will explore these questions through Memorial’s 35 years of work with the memory of political repression, wars, and the lives of people who found themselves witnesses to – and participants in – history.

This event will be held in English and Russian, with consecutive interpretation. 

Irina Scherbakova is a historian, philologist and oral historian. She was Director of the Oral History Centre at Memorial and, from 1999 to 2022, directed Memorial’s Russian Annual Historical Competition for High School Students. She has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Bremen and Jena and served as Chair of the Board of Memorial International.

Since 2023, she has been a Board Member of International Memorial and Chair of Zukunft Memorial in Berlin. She is a member of the governing and advisory boards of several German and Austrian memorial and historical institutions, including Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.

Her research and publications focus on the history of the Gulag, women in the Gulag, totalitarianism, historical memory and Ostarbeiter. She has received numerous international awards, including the Goethe Medal, the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Marion Dönhoff Prize, the Hemingway Prize and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bern.

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