Remembering the repression of the Stalin era in Russia: on the non-transmission of family memory

Research into some 30 families has revealed blank spaces in the history of many of these families, most of which date from the Stalin period. My thesis is that the internal policy of the Soviet state, with its repression and stigmatization of victims and their families, contributed to making certain pages of Soviet history disappear from family memories, or be reinterpreted within these memories. The policies of physical and symbolic stratification of the new “communist” society and stigmatization of broad social groups tended to create a gap between the social outcasts and their families. Families were impelled to “purge” their past and to eliminate the elements that could make them discreditable: to change names, surnames, and fathers’ names, to destroy the documents and photographs containing information about repressed people and to forget relatives lost from sight in the political turmoil. With the disappearance of eyewitnesses, firsthand memories that had not been transmitted to subsequent generations fell out of family history. These memory omissions result in these pages of family history being entirely wiped out, or lead to fragmented and impersonal memories.