Irina Scherbakowa

Sherbakova was born in Moscow in 1949.[1] Her parents were communists and Jewish. When she went to university she studied German and claimed her doctorate in 1972. She then became a translator working on fiction.[2]

In the 1970s she began to record interviews with witnesses to Stalinism.[2] She interviewed Gulag survivors who were afraid and would not talk if their recollections were recorded on a tape recorder.[3]

In 1988 Shcherbakova was one of the founding members of the organisation called Memorial.[2] She has been requesting that the authorities resolve the cases of the crimes committed whilst Stalinism was in charge in Russia.[4]

In 2014 she was chosen to be given the German Carl von Ossietsky Prize for Contemporary History and Politics which includes a prize of 10,000 euros. The judges chose her because of her campaign to study Russia's recent troubled history and for encouraging German - Russian relations.[2]

In 2016 the Memorial organisation was identified as a “foreign agent" by the Russian Ministry of Justice. In 2017 Shernakova was awarded the Goethe Medal.[1]

Shernakova's work has been translated and republished by The Guardian. In 2019 she accused the Russian establishment of trying to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin as a national hero and forgetting his human rights abuses which claimed millions of lives.[5]