Radio

Memorial No More? A History of Russian Forgetting

Memorial photograph by Catherine Merridale 1997 — Temporary memorial structure at the Butovo mass-grave site, Moscow, April 1997. At that time, the official estimate was that 80,000 murdered people had been buried in this ground between 1936 and 1953. Photograph by Catherine Merridale.

BBC Radio 4

In December 2022, a Russian human rights organisation, Memorial, accepted its share of the Nobel Prize for Peace. At a time when the Russian state was waging an illegal war (a Ukrainian organisation was one of the other two laureates), the award was not uncontroversial, but Memorial had earned it. It was ironic, then, that at the start of the same year, Memorial itself had been declared illegal in Russia. Some well-known members were in jail and others faced trial or emigration. A number had been murdered.

At the end of the 1980s, I was present at Memorial’s birth and it has remained important throughout my professional life. In over thirty years, it has called for historical justice in the former Soviet empire, working for the restoration of forgotten names, the recognition of state crimes and the mapping of Gulag sites and graves. People are the heart of it, their stories and their right to freedom, justice and dignity. Its premise is that lasting peace and freedom are only possible if human beings are citizens, confident in the rule of law and in political accountability.

The burden of the current war weighs heavily on its Russian members, raising questions about the organisation’s past and present effectiveness. That was what its chairman, Jan Rachinsky, meant when he accepted the prize as ‘an advance’ against the work that will have to be done if Russia is ever to deal with its criminal and over-mighty state authorities. Those organs of the Russian state have centuries of experience in the stifling of individual self-respect and agency. But if a culture of active citizenship is ever to flourish, if Russians are ever to demand full rights in any form of real democracy, if there is ever to be a reckoning with the present war and restitution for past wrongs, then Memorial’s work will be vital. As a voice for universal human rights, too, it speaks to all of us.

The programme aired on BBC Radio 4 on Monday 28 August 2023 at 20:00 and on Wednesday 30 August 2023 at 11.00 and was produced for the BBC by Mark Burman. It is available on BBC Sounds.

Russian Sci-Fi And Ukraine

Cover of the novel Red Lord (Krasnyi vlastelin) by Sergei Shkenev , published by Eksmo 2014 — Red Lord (Krasnyi vlastelin) by Sergei Shkenev , published by Eksmo 2014

BBC World Service

Most science-fiction looks towards a future, good or bad. In Communist times, that used to be the way that Soviet writers worked as well, whether or not entirely by choice. Since the 1990s, however, a darkness has fallen over Russian speculative fiction. For almost twenty years, too, it has focused on empire, warfare and revenge.

In this short documentary, produced by Mark Burman, I set out to look closer at this under-explored mass-market genre. The more we read, the more we wished that we had paid attention sooner, for here are set out many things that have now come to pass. One much-used trope of the books, for instance, is that of the accidental time-traveller, the popadanets, a person from our own time who suddenly finds himself back in the past (usually the Soviet past) and is tasked with righting perceived wrongs. Many such books are set during World War Two, but (given the real history) their themes are unexpected. For instance, in defiance of the facts (and twenty-seven million Soviet deaths) many imagine a victorious alliance between Stalin and Hitler to destroy the Atlantic powers. In others, it is Stalin who travels in time, coming back in wizard-like guise to put our world right on the battlefield. The link between national humiliation in Russia since the 1990s and a yearning for Fascist-style order and sacrifice could not be clearer.

More seriously, we found close links between some of the writers of this stuff, their sponsors, and policy-makers in the Kremlin. In the last twenty years, hundreds of popular stories have prefigured and even described a war against the West and NATO to reconquer Ukraine, annihilating the culture of Western liberalism. A number of their authors now wield power in occupied Eastern Ukraine while others are associated with the circle of presidential advisers in Moscow.

As for Ukraine, its own science fiction contrives to look forward. The future might be difficult, but Ukraine will exist and – in some new books - Ukrainians will still be doing what they do best.

The programme aired on the BBC World Service on Tuesday 1 August 2023 at 02:32 and 09:32 local time and on Sunday 6 August 2023 at 14.06 local time on the BBC World Service News Internet and was produced for the BBC by Mark Burman. It is available on BBC Sounds.

The Black Book

Ehrenburg and Grossman during a visit at the front near Kiev in order to collect evidence of German war crimes in 1944. — Ehrenburg (front left) and Grossman (front right) during a visit at the front near Kiev in order to collect evidence of German war crimes, 1944. © US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Irena Ehrenberg

BBC World Service

On 22 June, 1941, Nazi troops swept over the Soviet border at the launch of Operation Barbarossa. No-one was prepared for what followed, which included bombing, arson and merciless attacks on civilians. But not all civilians were treated in the same way. Ethnic Russians might survive or escape, but ethnic Jewish Soviets faced almost certain death. Hitler’s campaign of slaughter, later infamous as the Final Solution, began on Soviet soil. There, long before the exterminations at Auschwitz, almost two million Jewish civilians – many of them women, the elderly, or small children – were shot, clubbed, suffocated or buried alive.

They did not die without lament. Even as the murders were happening, witnesses began to write to Ilya Ehrenburg, the novelist turned war-writer that they all trusted most. The letters poured in by the day; thousands of them. It was Ehrenburg’s intention to edit them as a book, a literary memorial to all that was being lost. Indeed, he and a small group of fellow-writers succeeded in preparing a manuscript and submitting it for print. But Stalin had the book suppressed. The post-war world was not one where the stories suited him.

The Black Book wasn’t published until the 1980s, which is why its story, the story of the Holocaust by bullet, has been neglected in our overall narrative of the Holocaust (and, indeed, of the war itself). This documentary reconstructs what happened, from the earliest murders in Ukraine through shocked discovery, eye-witnessing and censorship and on into the present day.

The programme aired on the BBC World Service on Saturday 21 January 2023 at 19:06 local time and on Sunday 22 January 2023 at 12.06 local time and was produced for the BBC by Mark Burman. It is available on BBC Sounds.

Stalingrad - Destiny of a Novel

Cover of book Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman — Stalingrad - translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler

BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week

Vasily Grossman’s novel, Stalingrad, was published in English in 2019 to universal acclaim. Written in the shadow of the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War, the book brings life to the decisive campaign season at the end of 1942. Conceived as a Soviet War and Peace, it combines the grand narrative of war with intimate stories of family life, of human survival, courage, devotion and loss. In 1949, as Grossman was completing the manuscript, he rightly hoped he had produced the book that the Soviet people, struggling with harrowing memories and all-too vivid recent loss, were known to crave. But he would never see this first version in print. Instead, he had to fight his editors for months and years against a darkening backdrop of anti-semitism, fear, alcoholism and slavish obedience to authority.

In Radio Four’s Book of the Week, Catherine Merridale explores this story. Vasily Grossman kept a diary of the manuscript’s long journey to print and this, as well as moving extracts from the writer’s war journalism, is read throughout by Anton Lesser. The series airs between 2 and 6 December 2019 and is produced for the BBC by Mark Burman.

Schedule of Broadcasts
1/5 To Comrade Stalin		Mon 2 Dec 2019 9.45 am BBC Radio 4 FM
2/5 The Black Book		Tue 3 Dec 2019 9.45am BBC Radio 4 FM
3/5 The Progress of a Manuscript		Wed 4 Dec 2019 9.45am BBC Radio 4 FM
4/5 ‘Pull Yourself Together-Do Not Worry’		Thu 5 Dec 2019 9.45am BBC Radio 4 FM
5/5 In a Crooked Mirror		Fri 6 Dec 2019 9.45am BBC Radio 4 FM