NIZHNY ODES, Russia – Long lines of people waiting to buy milk, toilet paper and other necessities have disappeared from Russia decades ago. But one line only got longer – the one in which Yevgeniya B. Shasheva waited.
For 70 years.
This is the time that has elapsed since her birth in a remote Russian region. Her family was sent into exile there during Moscow the culmination of Stalin’s Great Purification in the 1930s, when millions were executed or died in prison camps.
According to Shasheva, she has been waiting for the past seven decades to move home to the Russian capital.
In a 2019 ruling by the Russian Constitutional Court, it ordered the government to do so, instructing such “children of the Gulag” – according to some estimates – to give about 1,500 of them the financial means to to draw cities from which Stalin had banished them. parents.
Parliament was supposed to discuss the matter last month, but the question was removed from its agenda. The process has now completely stalled, and Mrs. Shasheva left nearly 55,000 people in front of her to get social housing in Moscow.
So she waits 800 kilometers further in Nizhny Odes, a city so far off the beaten track that wild bears regularly appear on the streets.
“In Russia, people are still living in Soviet exile,” said Grigory V. Vaypan, a Harvard-trained lawyer who took Ms. Shasheva’s case to Russian courts. “Many people have lived in it for 70 to 80 years since their birth.”
The Russian state acknowledges that horrific crimes were committed under Stalin, but dealing with them has become increasingly difficult as the Kremlin seeks to draw attention to Russia’s glory instead of its pain.
In 1991, under Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, the government gave victims of repression the right to return home. It also ordered the state to provide housing for them and their children in their place of origin. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union that year, the country was in chaos, the government had little money and the law was largely ignored.
Although the country’s fortunes turned around a decade later, with oil prices rising after Vladimir V. Putin became president, there was little interest in concentrating on problems overcome by Stalin’s brutal rule. Instead of helping the victims return home as required by law, Moscow transferred the responsibility to local governments.
This led to a series of Kafkaesque requirements: To be eligible for social housing in Moscow, victims must first live in the city for 10 years, be paid less than the minimum wage and not own real estate. As a result, the process of offering apartments to people has mostly been halted.
For Mrs Shasheva’s family, their background gave them a slim chance of surviving Stalin’s political terror. Her father, Boris N. Cheboksarov, a member of a wealthy merchant family born in Switzerland, had the type of status that made it only a matter of time before he would be targeted by the secret police.
The forced exile of the family began in 1937, when Mr. Cheboksarov was arrested in their apartment in the center of Moscow, where he worked in the Soviet food industry. He is accused of being a Japanese spy and went to work in a mine in the northern region of Komi.
His father, who studied at Lausanne University, was also arrested and shot. He was also accused of being a spy for Japan.
Stalin had not yet put prisoners to work to build a railway line to the Far North, so Mr. Cheboksarov walks hundreds of kilometers through the taiga forest to his labor camp.
In the mine itself, he and other prisoners “worked like slaves,” said Anatoly M. Abramov, 81, who lived near the camp as a child and was one of the few surviving witnesses.
Despite the release of the camp in 1945, Mr. Cheboksarov forced to stay as an engineer and live outside his fences. There he meets Shasheva’s wife, Galina. Although she was taken to Nazi labor camps during World War II, the Russians accused her of collaborating with Germany and sent her into exile.
From Shasheva’s childhood near the Stalinist camp, she mostly remembers the cold. Once she was driving with her father in a truck to a nearby town. The vehicle broke down, and they removed its wood parts to light a fire while they waited to be rescued.
“Otherwise we would have frozen to death in less than an hour,” said Shasheva, speaking to her father’s Moscow accent, although she had never lived in the Russian capital herself. The harsh climate, with its dark winters and short, summer-mosquito-infested summers, also affected her health: as a child, she contracted tuberculosis amid poor local health care.
Such memories are among Mr. Putin’s term of office set aside.
Since his early days in the Kremlin, he has emphasized the need to honor Soviet achievements – especially their role in the defeat of Nazi Germany – and to draw any parallels between Stalin’s terror and Hitler’s atrocities. To ensure that the preferred version of history prevails, the Kremlin has distressed historians, researchers, and rights groups who focus on gulag research and memory.
Groups that work around people like me. Shasheva’s help also came under increasing pressure. Memorial, the leading civil society group in the field, was declared a foreign agent in 2012. .
Me. Shasheva’s efforts to return to Moscow are also hampered by such attempts.
“The Russian government wants to control this issue,” said Nikolay Epplee, an independent researcher who wrote a book on how governments deal with sinister times. “Whoever does it independently is expelled.”
In November, the Second Chamber of the Russian parliament debated solutions for people like Shasheva, but this led to complaints from some lawmakers that Stalin’s victims and their descendants in exile had been asked to skip the queue for social housing.
The government has finally decided on a proposal that puts the families of oppression victims in a twenty-year-long line.
Mr. Shayeva’s attorney, Mr. Vaypan, leads the effort to amend the draft legislation. His campaign to help children from the gulag has attracted tens of thousands of supporters, including many civil society organizations.
Shasheva walked through the grounds of the former camp to which her father was sent to work, saying that she had no choice but to keep fighting to get out of Nizhny Odes and to the place where she left her real home, Moscow, do not consider.
Despite living 800 kilometers further, Shasheva already considers herself a Moscowite. As she dreams about the city, she imagines herself lost in the whirlwind of busy streets.
“What I like about Moscow is how you can just walk into a crowd when it’s dark and see what’s going on,” she said. “I just want to feel the everyday life. We do not have it here. ”
Even if she manages to secure a place to live in Moscow, there remain other concerns.
“I’m still afraid that repression could come back,” Shasheva said. “I realized that deep down in all of us, the victims of oppression have entrenched this fear.”