Forest of historical delusions – Weekend – Kommersant
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The online exhibition “Sandormokh”, made by the St. Petersburg Iofe Foundation together with the International Society “Memorial”, which has long been declared a “foreign agent” and recently a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has been opened on the network. While wars of memory are destroying material monuments, the digital space is becoming a more reliable means of storing and transmitting historical information.
A year ago, on Karetny Ryad in the Museum of the Memorial Society, which at that time had been entered by the Ministry of Justice into the register of foreign agents for several years, an exhibition was opened “Material. Women’s memory of the Gulag”. Prison clothes patch on patch; napkins and curtains that humanized the space of the barracks; embroidered postcards and children’s books donated; rag toys sewn for both living and dead children; prayer books, collections of culinary recipes and other amazing types of textiles – through the woeful camp needlework, for everyday necessity or in order not to go crazy, a female story of the Stalinist terror was told, and the best contemporary artists and designers were, as usual, involved in the design of this story. The word “material” in the title of the exhibition referred to a cloud of concepts, where on the surface the meaning is “fabric”, and in the depths it is both a historical document, an investigative case, and a person who becomes an expendable material for a repressive machine. And at the same time, the word pointed to the main exhibition principle of the human rights society – using the latest exposition techniques to present material evidence of Stalin’s crimes against a person: this fragile materiality, ready to crumble in the hands, served as the strongest expressive means of any exhibition on Karetny Ryad.
“Material” was the last exhibition in the halls on Karetny. At the end of 2021, Memorial was liquidated by the decision of the Supreme Court, and all attempts to appeal the verdict failed. A month ago, the news that Memorial, together with the Belarusian human rights activist and political prisoner Ales Byalyatsky and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, caught the memorialists in the Tverskoy Court – the court ruled to turn the premises of Memorial on Karetny into state revenue. The exhibition about Sandormokh was not intended to be shown in Moscow – it was being prepared together with the Czech branch of Memorial and was supposed to open in St. Petersburg, and then move to Prague. However, the events of this year forced Memorial and the Iofe Foundation to abandon their original plans and transfer the project to an online format. Deprived of their main trump card, materiality, the organizers do not lose heart and say that the phantasmagoria of media art is “related to the absurdity and phantasmagorism of today’s life and the terrible events of the past.”
The virtual exhibition “Sandormokh” is more like a rpg game (excellent conceptual design by hptx studio). Wandering through the gloomy Karelian forest among tall pine trees with photographs and names of the executed, bumping into cabbage crosses and listening to the booming electronic echo of Pug Heel & Vip Zip sound designers, you have to find 17 works by contemporary artists. To collect scattered pages of Yanina Boldyreva’s book “The Last Hours” scattered here and there, the epigraph to which is the sonnet “Maundy Thursday” by the great Ukrainian poet Mykola Zerov, who was shot in Sandormokh in 1937: the terrible plots of book graphics are taken from the testimonies of executioners who were heard at the Military Tribunal in 1939 (in these court records, an indication was found of a tract in the vicinity of Medvezhyegorsk as a place of executions and mass graves). Enter the pillar of light of Daria Dorofeeva’s Dandelions, dedicated to another victim of Sandormokh, meteorologist and creator of the USSR Weather Bureau Alexei Wangenheim, over his camp letters to his daughter, in which he entertainingly, with drawings and herbariums, told the child about the principles of botany, everyone shed tears visitors to memorial exhibitions. Horrified at the sight and sound of “Breathing” by Alexander Shishkin-Hokusai – breathing heavily, like a sick person, execution pit. And finally, to come across the fenced construction site of the “Impossible Monument” by the media theorist Lev Manovich: using the services of a neural network, he received imaginary projects for a monument to the victims of Stalinist repressions in the manner of the architectural bureaus of Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and Shigeru Ban. The collection of virtual memorials compiled in this way seems to hint that the problem of Sandormokh is by no means in the quantity and quality of monuments, but in the state historical policy and the society’s readiness for repentance.
The 3D-scanned Sandormokh forest becomes not only a virtual exhibition site, but several historical routes are laid out and special memorial places are equipped. So, for example, suddenly a lake will spill in the middle of the thicket, and the silhouette of the Solovetsky Monastery will grow out of it, like the city of Kitezh – a steamer will sail to the pier, from the pipe of which the names of prisoners from the “Missing Stage” will pour out smoke – the search for traces of the Solovetsky camps who mysteriously disappeared during transportation in 1937, and brought the founders of the St. Petersburg “Memorial” Veniamin Iofe and Irina Fliege to Sandormokh. The “Missing Stage” will take you on a train, where you will have to listen to the stories of people who have been trying for years to find out about the fate of their relatives who disappeared on Solovki, and the train will bring you to the NKVD archive with doors slamming in front of your nose, where only a small fraction of declassified documents are issued. Under the play shell of “Sandormokh” is a strictly scientific historical research based on archival work (confessions of the Sandormokh executioners are generally published in such a volume for the first time).
In the forest you can find the ruins of the house “Slovo” – a famous monument of constructivism, a five-story building built in Kharkov in the late 1920s for cultural workers (in terms of the building it had the shape of the letter C – hence the name). On the walls of the virtual ruin (in March of this year the house was damaged during the shelling of Kharkov) the words of its inhabitants – the playwright Mykola Kulish, the poets Andriy Paniv and Valerian Polishchuk, who were killed in Sandormokh in the autumn of 1937, along with the outstanding director Les Kurbas, writer Valerian Pidmogilny and other masters of the “Executed Renaissance” (in total, about three hundred Ukrainians were executed here, so until 2014 the Ukrainian delegation was the largest at Sandormokh commemorative actions). In the forest, you can accidentally stumble upon a pit from which an endless paper tape crawls out the chronicle of Case D, the criminal prosecution of Yuri Dmitriev, the head of the Karelian branch of Memorial, one of those who in 1997 found these execution pits in a tract near Medvezhyegorsk, wrote the first book about Sandormokh and continued to search for places of executions and publish the names of the dead until the very arrest (since 2016, Dmitriev was in the pre-trial detention center of Petrozavodsk, at the end of 2021 he was sentenced to 15 years in a strict regime colony).
Wandering through the forest of Sandormokh, you gradually realize that it turned out to be the point at which all the roads converged that led to the current deplorable state of the “Memorial” – and not only him alone. Secrecy stamps on documents relating to the era of the Great Terror; the Ukrainian question and “The Executed Renaissance”; the case of Yuri Dmitriev; alternative excavations of the Russian Military Historical Society in Sandormokh in order to prove that not only the victims of repression, but also the Red Army soldiers killed by the Finns are buried here – there is no end to the wars of memory. And those who walk along the virtual historical spiral of the “Will Not Again” route will hear the voices of those who have spoken at the Sandormokh memorial days since 1997 – the sad refrain of all speeches is the words that this nightmare cannot be allowed to repeat. Today, listening to these speeches is especially bitter, but there is also good news: the “Clear History” button (an object of an artist who wished to remain anonymous) displayed in the virtual Sandormokh does not work.
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