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

Red Stone Bleeding

My mom (born 1919) grew up in the Volhynia area (150 kilometers west of Kyiv). Back then, it was home to a mishmash of cultures. Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and German farmers got along with each other, living side by side. They spoke each other’s languages, their children played with each other and they all dealt with the same fickle weather. The rich earth of the area didn’t care who was harvesting its grain. The wind blew, the rain fell, the sun warmed them all equally. 

From painting in a small Koresten, Ukraine museum

True, they might have worshipped in different churches, spoken different dialects in their homes, had different wedding customs and recipes, but they didn’t need weapons to solve those differences. It was Stalin and his secret police (OGPU, later NKVD) who can be credited for creating conflict in the tiniest settlements, or amongst families.  After the forced expulsions (my grandfather went through two expropriations, first in 1915 during the Great War, then again in 1930), then the 1917 Revolution and its ensuing civil war, there were a few years when the area was relatively peaceful. Those were the good years when my mom had a happy, but brief, childhood. The storks delivered babies, the windmill was built, there was a local church community. Communism, at this point was not a threat, but a support. The Soviets encouraged German peasants to build their own schools, churches and even a seminary for their pastors in Heimtal, near Zhytomyr. (I got to wander through those red brick ruins when I visited back in 2004). In A Biography of No Place, Kate Brown writes, “By 1926 there were eleven officially chartered minority regions in Ukraine, and nearly 300 nationally autonomous villages.” (page 20) 

After Lenin died in 1924, however, communist idealism was gradually replaced by Stalin’s ambition. The 1929 decree to liquidate the kulaks forced collectivization upon the family-minded peasants and violently broke up my mom’s home. Suddenly, there were enemies everywhere. German farmers were now labelled tight-fisted, or kulaks. After collectivization and the first Five Year Plan had been implemented, Stalin turned paranoid and started killing everyone around him. The assassination of Stalin’s close friend, Kirov, marking the beginning of the Great Terror/Purge. My German-speaking grandfather, was executed in 1937 as an enemy of the people under Article 58. His crime? My grandfather only wanted to leave the country and rejoin his orphaned children. 

And now we’re in 2022. Putin wants Ukraine to be part of his Russian family. He loves Ukraine so much that he will kill them all to keep them in his sphere of influence. What would King Solomon advise? Kill a child so that no one can have it?  And those in Russia who oppose him are threatened with 15 years imprisonment. 

Putin, Stalin, Hitler. Madmen again attacking the defenceless. No wonder the soil of my mother's home near Zhytomyr is so red. The red granite bleeds once again. 

Red Stones. All that's left of my grandfather's windmill