Photo: MEMORIAL
THE OTHER RUSSIA – Exhibition about MEMORIAL in Weimar
“You can’t destroy the memory of violence”, says Irina Scherbakowa, historian and Germanist, and chair of Zukunft MEMORIAL e.V. Together with her colleague, Philipp Dzyadko, and Volkhard Knigge, former director of the Foundation Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial, she curated the exhibition THE OTHER RUSSIA – MEMORIAL: The Struggle for Historical Truth and Democracy. The exhibition opened at the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar on 21 August 2024.
The exhibition sends out a public signal of MEMORIAL’s continued commitment to a democratic Russia, even under difficult conditions. It underlines the importance of this commitment for a peaceful and democratic Europe. In the current situation, which is marked not least by Russian disinformation to legitimise the illegal war of aggression against Ukraine, the exhibition aims to counter Russian propaganda with facts and contribute to enlightenment and clarification. It is the first nationally visible project of the organisation in its forced exile in Germany.
MEMORIAL was illegally liquidated in Russia in February 2022. Many of the organisation’s staff were forced to flee Russia for safety reasons. Since then, MEMORIAL has continued its work from exile in Berlin, among other places, with the association Zukunft MEMORIAL, founded in 2023. Körber-Stiftung supports Zukunft MEMORIAL in continuing its work from Berlin as part of the international MEMORIAL network.
“The exhibition is sending out a clear signal that MEMORIAL will not be intimidated and will continue its work for a democratic Russia. We are showing that despite brutal repression and numerous war crimes, there is still another Russia that needs our solidarity”, underlines MEMORIAL’s co-founder Scherbakowa.
The human rights and history organisation MEMORIAL, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, has been working since the late 1980s to investigate the crimes of Stalinism, to document repression and political tyranny in the Soviet Union and Russia, and to rehabilitate victims and support survivors of the Soviet labour camp system, the GULag. In Russia, the organisation has been organising the national history competition for children and young people for more than 20 years and is one of the founding members of Körber-Stiftung’s EUSTORY Network. MEMORIAL also campaigns against contemporary right-wing extremism and for democracy and human rights in Russia, documents Russian war crimes and is one of the most vocal critics of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. The exhibition honours the dangerous work for human rights and historical reappraisal. Scherbakowa says: “Our colleagues have been threatened, kidnapped, arrested and even killed for their courageous work for human rights.”
Original testimonies of repression and resistance from MEMORIAL’s collections and archives form the core of the exhibition. It shows, for example, letters, drawings, clothes and homemade dolls made by prisoners – testimonies of the attempt to preserve human dignity in the daily hell of the GULag system.
A special exhibit is the one-stringed violin made by prisoner Mikhail Govoryonkov from plywood, wire and a few nails in 1944. After his release, he gave the violin to his niece Natasha, who married an exchange student from the GDR (“East Germany”) in Moscow and went to Dresden with him in the early 1960s. In 2002, the violin was damaged during the century flood, taken to an attic to dry out – and was forgotten. It was not until 2023, after Natascha’s death, that it was found by her son Andrej Meyer and given to MEMORIAL. In Weimar, the violin tells of suffering and resistance to dehumanisation, giving a face and a name to the victims of political violence.
The exhibition THE OTHER RUSSIA is organised under the patronage of Carsten Schneider, Minister of State and Federal Government Commissioner for Eastern Germany, as part of the “Kunstfest Weimar” (Weimar Art Festival). It will be on display at the Bauhaus Museum until 6 January 2025.
Human rights activist Oleg Orlow, who was released in a prisoners’ exchange between Russia and Germany in early August, attended the opening as guest of honour. Orlow is a founding member and co-chair of the MEMORIAL Human Rights Center. Together with Irina Scherbakowa, he spoke about protest and resistance in Russia at KörberForum in Hamburg on 3 September 2024.
