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Remembering the Victims of Stalin’s

Great Terror

JUDY DEMPSEY

An exhibition of Stalin’s campaign of political repression in

1937–1938 coincides with Vladimir Putin’s attempts to forget
this part of Russia’s past.

March 09, 2015 PRINT PAGE

W hen martial law was declared in Poland in December 1981,

Tomasz Kizny, then twenty-three years old, had the choice between
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emigrating and joining the underground resistance.

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Kizny chose the second option. He became a member of the
Solidarity trade union movement and spent the rest of the decade
taking photos of a dogged resistance that was to bring the RECENT ANALYSIS FROM
JUDY DEMPSEY’S STRATEGIC EUROPE
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was an extraordinary time. Kizny seized the opportunity to capture
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“ALer 1989, I Mnally had the possibility to get a passport,” Kizny told
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Carnegie Europe on the eve of the opening of his exhibition, !e Reliable EU and NATO
Member?
Great Terror 1937–1938. Pe photographer’s commemoration of the Thursday, March 30, 2023

victims of Stalin’s political repression is now on show at the House of

Poland’s (Lack of) Vision for
Brandenburg-Prussian History in Potsdam, Germany. Europe
Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Instead of going West aLer

the fall of Communism, Judy Dempsey
Dempsey is a nonresident
Kizny went East to Vorkuta, senior fellow at Carnegie
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Contest
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Europe and editor in chief of Strategic

a Russian town north of the Europe.
Arctic Circle. He had a <
@JUDY_DEMPSEY
reason. “I wanted to follow Judy Dempsey Retweeted

Tymofiy Mylo…
the traces of the Polish @Mylovanov · 22h

prisoners,” he explained. Replying to @Mylovanov

None of it would be possible
without the minister of health
Pere were two waves of Polish deportations under Stalin. Pe Mrst @liashko_viktor and the deputy
governor of the Kyiv regional
was in 1939, the second in 1944–1945. Kizny’s own grandparents and administration @TwinLawyer
They kept pushing us. Also, the
great-grandparents were caught up in the deportations, under which heart of the project was Bohdan B,
the deputy minister of health 5/
prisoners were sent to the Gulag forced-labor camps. Some never
returned.

Until the late 1980s, the Gulags had been taboo in Poland. Kizny had
read about them in samizdat, the Soviet-era system of clandestinely
printing and distributing censored literature. “It was in the late 1970s 1 219

when I read [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn’s !e Gulag Archipelago. It was Judy Dempsey Retweeted

circulating in samizdat. I had one and a half days to read it and then I
@Judy_Dempsey
had to pass it on. It had a huge impact on me,” he recalled.
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ALer he Mnished his project about Polish prisoners, Kizny turned his CARNEGIE EUROPE

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camera to the Gulags themselves. Pe opportunities to access archives Civil Society Support in Acute
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and to travel throughout Russia were opened up. Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last leader, and Boris Israel-Palestine’s Democracy
Yeltsin, Russia’s Mrst post-Communist president, the past became and Security Crisis: How Should
the EU Respond?
accessible. Pe Gulags, the Great Terror of 1937–1938, and the Katyn Wednesday, April 05, 2023

massacre—a series of mass executions of Poles carried out by the Ukraine’s Total Democratic
Soviet secret police in 1940—were no longer taboo. Resilience in the Shadow of
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“Pere was access to the archives,” Kizny recalled. “Pere was access
to the sites where the Gulags once were.” His book, which coincided Learning to Do No Harm to
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with Anne Applebaum’s monumental Gulag: A History, was the Mrst With Authoritarian States
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visual book about the labor camps.
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Kizny then turned his attention to the Great Terror. For him, his Ukraine: What Kind of World
Order?
oLen-harrowing work on that subject was about preserving the Tuesday, February 28, 2023

memory of a horriMc episode of Russian history in which 750,000

people from all backgrounds were executed, secretly, between August
1937 and November 1938.

“One in 100 of the Soviet Union’s adult citizens were secretly

murdered. Pat’s 1,600 executions a day,” Kizny said. More than
800,000 were sentenced to up to ten years’ hard labor in the Gulag
camps. Only 100,000 survived.

Kizny’s photographs of the Great Terror are special in three ways. Pe

Mrst is the impact of the faces of those prisoners who were
photographed by the Soviet secret police when they were arrested. In
most cases, the prisoners were murdered within forty-eight hours.

In the exhibition, 79 black-and-white photos of these individuals

stare out at you. Most have an expression of bewilderment, fear, and
exhaustion. ALer 1938, the photos were stored in secret archives.
“When they came to light in the early 1990s, they became one of the
most vivid visual accounts of Soviet Communism’s crimes,” Kizny
said.

Pe second striking aspect of the exhibition is Kizny’s series of

pictures of places where there were mass graves. With assistance from
Memorial, an independent organization set up in the early 1990s to
investigate and preserve the memory of those persecuted in the Soviet
Union, Kizny found, visited, and photographed the sites.

His pictures convey a sense of emptiness, of silence, of the shocking

reminder that underneath Orthodox churches, forests, factories, and
hills are the remains of so many innocent people who were shot and
then thrown into mass graves.

Pe third and most moving aspect of the exhibition is the set of

photos and interviews Kizny held with the children of the victims. By
now, these are old, sad people. Looking straight into the camera, they
recount the past. Pey talk of the last time they saw their parents, of
being unable for years to Mnd out what happened to them, or to
discover why, where, and when they were executed—or where they
were buried.

“Pese children were deprived of mourning. Mourning is a part of the

human condition. For years and years they knew nothing,” Kizny
said. Yeltsin had rehabilitated many of those who died or survived the
camps. “Even then,” said Kizny, “when the survivors had been freed
from the camps, they were second-class citizens. In many cases, their
lives had been broken.”

Pe interviews, in Russian with German subtitles, have the effect of

transporting you back to a distant past dominated by fear,
helplessness, and being forgotten. Pey are very powerful and very
moving.

For Kizny and his colleagues and friends in Memorial, investigating,

preserving, and talking about the past is tied to a country’s identity—
and, indeed, its future. “Memory is so important for the identity of a
country. What happens to a nation without a memory, with a
selective view of the past?” Kizny asked rhetorically.

Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia’s past is under scrutiny but in

completely the opposite way to how Gorbachev and Yeltsin dealt with
it. Memorial, for example, has been under constant pressure from the
Kremlin, as are many other independent nongovernmental
organizations.

In early March 2015, Perm-36, the only museum in Russia created on

the site of a former Gulag camp, was forced to close. “It is ceasing its
activities and beginning the process of self-liquidation,” according to
a statement issued by the museum.

“It’s terrifying what is happening,” Kizny said. “It’s as if there are two
kinds of memories competing with each other—the positive and the
negative one. Pe historical policy of the Kremlin is about an identity
linked to a great state, not to the tragic things that Russians did to
Russians.”

Photo credit: Tomasz Kizny

Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein
are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its
trustees.

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