Nobel Peace Prize and Memorial

Nobel Peace Prize Certificate from CC Neptuul

Nobel Peace Prize award acceptance speeches  will be aired on December 10th from Oslo, Norway. One of the three recipients is the International Memorial Society, founded in 1987. Memorial’s aims have been to reveal and showcase the crimes of the Stalin years. While it's now legally banned in Russia, it continues to function in various other countries. 

I try to highlight these abuses in my own humble way through my stories. The Kulak’s Daughter (aka, Red Stone) is a novel focused on the  First Five Year Plan, to liquidate the kulaks. It destroyed my mother’s family farm, killed my grandmother, and toddler uncle. The sequel, Broken Stone, was about how my mom and her siblings managed to dodge a state orphanage, leave the Soviet Union and narrowly avoid the famine, while her dad, my grandfather, was not allowed to leave … how he managed to survive the Holodomor and then disappeared into the behemoth of the Great Terror. 

With the sacrifice of the Soviet Red Army, under Stalin’s ruthless leadership, the Nazis were finally crushed and USSR's reward was the Iron Curtain and the loss of freedom for millions of east Europeans. Stalin’s Red Army turned ordinary men into monsters, many who turned to the bottle to numb any remaining humanity left inside them.  Now in Crow Stone I explore how civilians like my mom were worked to death in inhumane forced labour camps ... again under Stalin.

That these horrific things happened under Stalin’s leadership is not disputed. But that modern Russia continues to deliberately downplay the human rights’ abuses under Stalin shows that Memorial’s mission is far from over.  Instead of healing, there is continued repression and ruthless violence. Holocaust survivors can go to numerous centres throughout Europe and re-imagine the Nazi horror of concentration camps and extermination centres. But an organization like Memorial honouring the memories of my own broken family becomes outlawed in the vary places it happened.  

With Uri, my translator, and the bundle of files
about my family in the Zhytomyr secret police archives

I was fortunate enough to have access to my family members' secret police files in Zhytomyr.  The last entry, was a letter dated August 16, 1989, from the KGB acknowledging that my uncle, Gustav, was indeed politically repressed and executed in 1937.  His brother, my grandfather, had a similar fate but that was waiting for me to discover. 

The fact that Memorial is now considered a foreign agent and banned in modern Russia, under Putin, proves that its truths have power. Putin is afraid of the truth. Long live Memorial. Maybe someday I'll be able to create a memorial to my grandmother out in Yaya, Siberia.  For now, I can only write stories. 

And, forever, I'll be grateful to Don Miller, who introduced me to my mom's home and family. His book, Under Arrest, did for me, what Memorial is doing for human rights worldwide. If I had a voice, I'd be giving Don Miller his own Nobel Prize for Peace.  He has written several books and has a great website where he showcases extensive research.

Don Miller in my mom's home village, Federofka,
with an old woman who remembered my mom's family

Connecting

Thrilled to see that my web  page at Shepherd for Authors is live.

Marketing is such a tough area for me (I would rather hide somewhere with a book near my nose than try and actually sell a book). Therefore, I'm grateful to connect with others interested in 20th century history under Stalin and Hitler. 

I appreciate the great idea behind this resource which is to connect with readers and recommend my favourite books on my areas of interest. 

Check it out!  Here is the URL:

https://shepherd.com/best-books/stalin-and-hitler-era-for-young-people-and-adults

For Uncle Albert

Here's a photo of a pack of cigarettes from the Soviet Union. They're supposed to still be quite common over there - strong, unfiltered and cheap. They're called Belomorkanal. The cover image shows a map of the country with the three canals that Stalin had gulag prisoners work on marked in red.

The projects included: the White Sea Canal, the Moscow Canal and the Volga-Don canal. These projects were built under brutal conditions. The White Sea Canal project was basically a waste of time because it was built in a hurry and therefore too narrow and too shallow. Many people died during its construction - including a brother of my mom's - who just disappeared while there. Nobody grieved his death, his lack of life, because everyone was too busy just trying to stay alive themselves. His name was Albert.

Uncle Albert was the son of a kulak and therefore, an enemy of the people. He lived, worked, and died for Stalin's vision of a canal that never worked. Cheap cigarettes?

Click here for more information and photographs about the building of the White Sea Canal.

The Gulag

Twelve facts* about the Soviet Gulag.
1. The word gulag is an acronym. It comes from the words "Glavnoe upravlenie lagerie" meaning Main Camp Administration.
2. Over 30,000 camp units were registered.
3. The Gulag - as a system of labour - was officially dissolved on January 25, 1960. It continued on a smaller scale until 1987.
4. The Gulag included: labour camps, punishment camps, transit camps, criminal and political camps, women's camps and children's camps.
5. In 1929, Stalin's secret police began to take over the control of these camps. (Previously they'd been under judicial rule.)
6. Best estimates indicate 28.7 million people passed through the Gulag system. (According to Anne Applebaum).
7. The Gulag was part of Stalin's economic plan - forced labour to build industry. (Gold, coal, ore, lumber, uranium, the White Sea Canal, train track expansion, etc.)
8. Gulag victims were arrested not for specific crimes but for their potential crimes as an 'enemy' of the Soviet state.
9. Gulag victims died of hunger, cold, work, disease & hopelessness. Total death statistics are unavailable.
10. Corpses were stacked up during the winter for a mass burial when the ground thawed.
11. The West has yet to realize the extent of human rights abuses committed in the USSR.12. The Memorial Society was created in the former Soviet Union to remember the Gulag's victims.

* facts
These facts are not certain. The cold, hard facts may never be known.

Here's a link to a photo site of the gulag.

One more fact: My mom was in the Gulag system twice. Once, in winter of 1930/1, as an eleven year daughter of a kulak and then again in 1945 as a German prisoner of war. She came to Canada and wanted to forget and now here I am, trying to make her remember.