Howard Amos, Author at Coda Story

Russia’s lock on family history

Howard Amos — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 05:00:00 +0000

This past summer, Dmitry Ostryakov, a high school astronomy teacher and human rights activist, drove for nearly 16-hours from his home in St. Petersburg to the village of Gotovye near Russia’s border with Ukraine.

His father joined him for what was a deeply personal journey. His great-grandfather, Vasily Ostryakov, lived in the village during World War II and was then convicted there, on charges of collaborating with the Nazis. And for several years now, Ostryakov has been trying to uncover the full story — and whether he was really guilty, or not.

But what started as an interest in his family history has turned into an extraordinary battle with the Russian authorities, who refuse to release the criminal case files they hold on Vasily Ostryakov, even though they are now more than 70 years old. Dmitry Ostryakov has come up hard against what critics characterize as the government’s determination to bury anything that conflicts with its glorious version of Russia’s past.

The cornerstone of this narrative is the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany when Joseph Stalin was leader. And in stressing that victory, many say the mass killings and political terror he is also famous for are being deliberately played down. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has all but admitted it, warning in an interview earlier this year that “excessive demonization” of Stalin was being used as a way to attack Russia.

The files are held by the FSB, Russia’s domestic security agency, and the courts have repeatedly taken its side against Ostryakov. In Kafkaesque fashion, Russian law says that the documents can only be shown to parties involved in the criminal case — which was in 1943. It was the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, who opened the case. The files were then inherited by its successor, the KGB, and then in turn by its post-Soviet successor, the FSB.

Dmitry Ostryakov has been interested in his family history since he was 10 years old. But the now 33-year-old teacher knows little about his great-grandfather’s fate other than that he was convicted of Nazi collaboration after the Red Army retook Gotovye. He was then sentenced to seven years in a Gulag prison camp, in Russia’s Far East, and died there just 18 months later. Vasily Ostryakov has no known grave.

“I would just like to know the details of this case,” says Dmitry Ostryakov, who has also investigated other branches of his family’s history. “Did my great-grandfather collaborate in forms that I find acceptable, or not?” Russia’s President Vladimir Putin warned in an interview earlier this year that “excessive demonization” of Stalin was being used as a way to attack Russia.

There is a “myth that there were only heroic people during the war and that we only need to talk about them,” says Ostryakov. “But it wasn’t like that. There were different people, different human stories, different situations.”

The courts have backed the FSB’s circular argument that such files can only be shown to parties to the criminal case.

An exception can be made for relatives if the individual in question was rehabilitated — a legal procedure introduced after the end of the Soviet Union for victims of Stalin’s repression. And Dmitry Ostryakov tried that approach. But in 2015, a court in Belgorod, the main city in the region where his great-grandfather lived, threw out his petition.

There are no definite figures on the number of people who have not been granted rehabilitation, but Ostryakov says it is likely to run to hundreds of thousands.

Vasily Ostryakov (sitting) — Dmitry Ostryakov’s great-grandfather; Vasily Ostryakov (left) with his wife and two children. Photos courtesy of Dmitry Ostryakov.

The little information he does have about his great-grandfather is from a short document handed to him in 2015 by prosecutors. Vasily Ostryakov, born in 1897, worked as a secretary for a local collective farm in Belgorod region for the six months it was under Nazi control from July 1942. In his trial, he pleaded not guilty of collaboration and said he was elected to the role and because he was trusted by fellow villagers.

“He was an ordinary peasant,” says Dmitry Ostryakov. “He was a civilian who worked as an intermediary between the occupying power and the local population.”

And in Dmitry Ostryakov’s view, the fact his relatives were able to live in the same village for years after his death without being shunned by locals, suggests his great-grandfather did nothing wrong. But he admits he is speculating. This is “fantasy,” Ostryakov says. “In order to speak more objectively I want to see the criminal case materials.”

When Dmitry Ostryakov arrived in the village Gotovye — his first ever visit — he found his great-grandfather’s house. He also tracked down the grave of another person who was convicted of collaboration at the same time. But unlike his great-grandfather, this man served his sentence and returned to live out his days in the village.

Many thousands of people were sentenced to death, or long prison terms on flimsy or fabricated evidence during Stalin’s brutal rule. And during and after World War Two, which Russians refer to as the Great Patriotic War, those suspected of cooperating with the Nazis were treated with particular severity. That included hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers captured by the Nazis, who were sent to prison camps once they were liberated by the Red Army.

Vasily Ostryakov lived in the house on the right in Gotovnye

The situation the family now find themselves is not unusual, according to Ivan Pavlov, the head of Team 29, a Russian NGO and law firm working with Ostryakov on the case. The court rulings are in line with an “obvious trend towards secrecy” in modern Russia, he says.

After losing their bid to rehabilitate his great-grandfather, Dmitry Ostryakov and Team 29 turned to a St. Petersburg court for permission to see the documents last year. But the judge there also ruled in favor of the FSB. They are now considering taking the case to Russia’s Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights.

In a small ray of light, the St. Petersburg court threw out a legal attempt by the FSB to compel Ostryakov to pay the 26,000 rubles ($434) expenses of one of its staff members who had traveled by train from Belgorod for the hearing. “I should decide whether to tell other people the story of my great-grandfather. Not the state.” Dmitry Ostryakov

But they are rowing against a strengthening tide. Several new statues to Stalin have been erected in recent years, including a bust unveiled by Russia’s Culture Minister last month. And historians and rights activists say that highlighting the Soviet dictator’s crimes, or his wartime mistakes, is becoming increasingly risky.

Those objecting publicly to the state’s preferred narrative have faced losing their jobs, or even criminal prosecution. Yuri Dmitriev, a 61-year-old historian who spent his life uncovering the mass graves of victims of Stalinist repression is currently being tried in the northern city of Petrozavodsk on charges of pedophilia, which friends and supporters say are fabricated.

Ostryakov says the publicity around his legal battle has not just generated bureaucratic brick walls, but also letters of support from people in similar situations. He wants to change the law, to give relatives of those who have not been officially “rehabilitated” access to documents about their cases.

“I should decide whether to tell other people the story of my great-grandfather,” he says. “Not the state.”

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One Man’s Struggle For Russia’s Soviet Memory

Howard Amos — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 19:14:00 +0000

Three crooked, concrete pylons represent the fence posts that once ringed the camp. A dozen emaciated human figures, also fashioned from concrete, huddle below, representing the thousands of Soviet prisoners incarcerated here in World War II — in front of a pyramid of human skulls. It is known as the memorial to Dulag-100, the Nazi prisoner-of-war camp that once stood here. But this place is also a tribute to one man’s struggle to preserve this memory in the face of years of institutionalized disinterest and denial. Aleksandr Manachinsky, devoted most of his adult life to constructing the memorial, in Russia’s north-west region of Pskov. But it was his son Vladislav who completed it. Manachinsky senior, a St. Petersburg architect, died six months before it finally opened last June — and thanks to private rather than state support. At least three million Soviet POWs died in Nazi-captivity, most of them Russian. Yet across the country, there are just a handful of monuments remembering them — because both the Soviet Union and the Russian government of today treat them as a source of shame. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09OYjo-XO3o[/embed]

“The attitude of the state, the army and former soldiers who weren’t captured hasn’t changed,” says Pavel Polian, a historian at Russia’s Higher School of Economics and an expert on World War II prisoners. Soviet POWs, he adds, are still seen as “traitors and collaborators.” Other less glorious episodes of Russia’s wartime history - such as the behavior of its own troops as they took over Germany — are similarly played down, or simply erased altogether, critics say, in the Kremlin’s efforts to create a unifying historical narrative. Aleksandr Manachinsky’s interest in Dulag-100 began while he was working in Porkhov, a town near the site, in the 1980s. When he heard what had happened to the prisoners at the camp, it “touched him very deeply,” says his son, Vladislav, a sculptor. Some Russian media reports have said as many as 85,000 people perished here. Experts suggest that figure is inflated, but no one doubts there was huge suffering here. And Manachinsky felt the small memorial stone he found at the site did not reflect the scale of what amounted to a forgotten atrocity. So he set about designing a vast memorial complex, and looking for funding. “It was the most important work of his life,” says his son. Dulag is short for “Durchgangslager”, the German term for “transit camp”. And Dulag-100 was one of dozens set up the Nazis in Russian territory they occupied. They were usually built next to railway stations, serving as both transport hubs to send forced labor to other parts of Germany-occupied territory, or as killing sites in themselves. Jews and Soviet officials were often executed in such camps. Starvation, disease, exposure and mistreatment claimed the lives of many more. Dulag-100 was based around a Red Army barracks, but this didn’t give POWs much shelter, according to local historian Mikhail Tuk. “During the day they had to be outside regardless of the weather,” he says. At times the camp was so full many prisoners had to sleep outside, even in the harsh Russian winter.

Official Disdain

Many of their experiences have only come to light since the fall of the Soviet Union, as surviving former POWs have been able to speak publicly about their incarceration. Some war archives were opened too in the 1990s. And yet official disdain for Soviet citizens captured by the Nazis hasn’t changed. That meant it was hard to drum up support for the Dulag-100 memorial. Manachinsky ploughed on through the 1980s, but what funds he had dried up in 1992, before he could finish the project. By contrast, any event or monument celebrating victory in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War is virtually guaranteed to get official support. Manachinsky tried that route, writing to leading Russian political figures begging for money, but to no avail.

1/11: Soviet prisoners in Nazi POW camp Dulag-100 line up for food in the winter of 1941-42. Photo taken by unknown German soldier. Courtesy of local historian Mikhail Tuk

2/11: Soviet prisoners in Nazi POW camp Dulag-100 line up for food in the winter of 1941-42. Photo taken by unknown German soldier. Courtesy of local historian Mikhail Tuk

3/11: Original design plan for the Dulag-100 memorial from the early 1980s. Photo courtesy of Vladislav Manachinsky

4/11: Plan for the memorial site from the early 1980s. Photo courtesy of Vladislav Manachinsky

5/11: 1980s model and plan for the memorial. Photo courtesy of Vladislav Manachinsky

6/11: The memorial under construction in 2015. Photo courtesy of Rosavtodor (Russia’s road building agency)

7/11: Standing firm: official attitudes to memorializing Soviet POWs haven’t changed despite the opening of the Dulag-100 memorial. Photo courtesy of Rosavtodor

8/11: Tens of thousands of Soviet POWs were incarcerated in the Nazi-run Dulag-100 camp. Photo courtesy of Rosavtodor

9/11: The Dulag-100 memorial opened in June 2016. Photo courtesy of Rosavtodor

10/11: Forgotten memories: construction of the memorial stalled for more than a decade. Photo courtesy of Rosavtodor

11/11: Architect Alexandr Manachinsky (left) and his son, Vladislav Manachinsky, at a memorial to Soviet soldiers who fought in Afghanistan in St. Petersburg in 2014. Photo courtesy of Vladislav Manachinsky

Locals dubbed the unfinished edifice the “hockey sticks”, or the “three boots.” Motorcyclists used the area as a practice ground. Farmers brought their cattle to graze around the monument. “The soldiers were without heads and it was tragic,” says his son Vladislav Manachinsky, “even a cause for shame.” It was local people who were the key to getting it finished. Laborers working on a nearby road raised money to re-start the work in 2015, and as word spread donations came in from road-workers nationwide. A special charity was set up to receive donations. But when work resumed, Aleksandr Manachinsky was too ill to oversee it and had to hand over to his son. The 42-year-old Vladislav Manachinsky, who knew the monument from summers he had spent helping his father as a student, says he simplified the original design, scrapping some side panels and adding a bell. But, he says, his father would have approved. It was a “double responsibility,” he says. “On one hand, it was my father’s work. That was very important. And then there was the social significance.” More than three decades after Manachinsky first conceived of the Dulag-100 memorial, it finally opened last June. Several top officials came to the ceremony, including one of Putin’s advisors, a government minister, and the Pskov Region governor. But none mentioned the words “prisoner of war” in their speeches. The Dulag-100 memorial is a rare challenge to the official narrative - its awkward, angular structure poking above the landscape almost a metaphor for the battle to preserve a more balanced reading of Russia’s history. There are a few other exceptions, but they tend to prove the rule. A statue has been set up for the POWs of Dulag-184 in Vyazma in the Smolensk Region - but it was thanks to a campaign initiated by relatives of the dead and human rights groups. The Soviet Union’s prisoners of war have yet to be fully remembered. But Vladislav Manachinsky is clear their history cannot be forgotten. “They are our citizens and they died for the motherland,” he says. “A lot of people ended up as prisoners not because they were cowards, but because that’s just what happened.”

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