Irina Scherbakova to deliver speech honouring Anne Applebaum

Irina Lasarevna Scherbakova was born in 1949 to Jewish parents in Moscow. After pursuing university studies and completing her doctorate, she went on to work as a translator of German-language fiction and as editor of the literary magazines Soviet Literature and Literaturnaya Gazeta. In the early 1980s, she recorded interviews with survivors of the Gulag and in 1989 was a founding member of Memorial, an organisation that would go on to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Memorial advocated for a process of documenting, examining and working through the crimes of Stalinism in the former Soviet Union. Today, Scherbakova is among the most well-known human rights activists in Russia and the former Soviet Union.

Starting in 1996, Scherbakova was active for ten years as a professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. In addition to her work on the Gulag and Soviet camps on German soil, her key fields of research included oral histories, totalitarianism, Stalinism and policies of remembrance and cultural memory in Russia.

Among Scherbakova’s most important works in German are Nur ein Wunder konnte uns retten. Leben und Überleben unter Stalins Terror (tr. Only a miracle could save us. Life and survival under Stalin’s Terror, 2000), Der Russland-Reflex. Einsichten in eine Beziehungskrise (tr. The Russia reflex. Insights into a relationship crisis, 2015) and Die Hände meines Vaters. Eine russische Familiengeschichte (tr. The hands of my father. A Russian family history, 2017).

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the dissolution of Memorial, Scherbakova left her homeland and moved abroad. Today, she lives in Berlin and Israel and is chairperson of Memorial Zukunft, an exile organisation founded in Berlin.

Many of the films and books that draw on Scherbakova’s research have received awards, and her work as an academic has taken her on several extended research trips to Berlin, Vienna, Salzburg and Jena. She is on the board of trustees at the Buchenwald Memorial and a member of the non-profit organisation known as Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (Action Reconciliation Service for Peace) From 2007 till 2015 she was member of the international council at the Berlin-based Topography of Terror Foundation. Scherbakova herself has received several awards, including the Marion Dönhoff Prize in 2022. On that occasion, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz delivered the speech honouring the recipient.