NIZHNY ODES, Russia – Long lines of people waiting to buy milk, toilet paper and other essentials disappeared from Russia decades ago. But the queue only got longer – the one that Yevgeniya B. Shasheva was waiting for.
For 70 years.
This is the time that has passed since his birth in a remote region of Russia. Her family was exiled from Moscow during the height of Stalin’s Great Purge in the 1930s, when millions were executed or died in prison camps.
Over the past seven decades, says Shasheva, she has been waiting to move to the Russian capital.
A 2019 decision by the Russian Constitutional Court ordered the government to make this happen, determining that these “sons of the gulag” – about 1,500 of them, according to some estimates – were given the financial means to move to the cities where Stalin came from. banned his parents.
Parliament was due to discuss the matter last month, but the issue has been dropped from its agenda. Now, the process is completely paralyzed, leaving Shasheva with almost 55,000 people ahead of him in line for social housing in Moscow.
So, she waits 800 miles in Nizhny Odes, a city so far from known paths that wild bears regularly appear on the streets.
“In Russia, people still live in Soviet exile,” said Grigory V. Vaypan, a Harvard-educated lawyer who took over Shasheva’s case in Russian courts. “Many people have lived in it for 70 to 80 years, since they were born.”
The Russian state recognizes that terrible crimes were committed during Stalin’s government, but dealing with them has become increasingly difficult as the Kremlin seeks to draw attention to Russia’s past glories rather than its pain.
In 1991, under Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, the government granted victims of repression the right to return home. He also ordered the State to provide them and their children with housing 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.
Even with the country’s fortunes reversed a decade later, with oil prices rising after Vladimir V. Putin became president, there was little interest in focusing on the problems raised by Stalin’s brutal government. Therefore, instead of helping victims to return home as required by law, Moscow transferred this responsibility to regional governments.
This resulted in a series of Kafkaesque requirements: to qualify for social housing in Moscow, victims must first live in the city for 10 years, receive less than the minimum wage and have no real estate. As a result, the process of providing people with apartments, for the most part, has been halted.
For Shasheva’s family, their background gave them little chance of surviving Stalin’s political terror. His father, Boris N. Cheboksarov, a member of a wealthy family of traders who were born in Switzerland, had the kind of status that made it only a matter of time before he was targeted by the secret police.
The family’s forced exile began in 1937, when Cheboksarov was arrested in his apartment in central Moscow, where he worked in the Soviet food industry. Accused of being a Japanese spy, he was sent to work at a mine in northern Komi.
Her father, who had attended university in Lausanne, was also arrested and shot, also accused of being a spy from Japan.
Stalin had not yet put prisoners to work on building a railway to the Far North, so Mr. Cheboksarov had to walk hundreds of kilometers to his work camp through the taiga forest.
At the mine itself, he and other prisoners worked “as slaves,” said Anatoly M. Abramov, 81, who lived near the camp as a child and is one of the few surviving witnesses.
Despite being released from the camp in 1945, Mr. Cheboksarov was forced to stay as an engineer, living outside his fences. There, he met Mrs. Shasheva’s mother, 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.
Since Shasheva’s childhood near the Stalinist camp, she mostly remembers the cold. She once went with her father in a truck to a nearby city. The vehicle broke down and they removed its wooden parts to start a fire while waiting for the rescue.
“Otherwise, we would have died frozen in less than an hour,” said Shasheva, who speaks with his father’s Muscovite accent, despite never having lived in the Russian capital. The terrible climate, with dark winters and short summers and doped with mosquitoes, also affected her health: as a child, she contracted tuberculosis in the midst of poor local health care.
These memories were put aside during Putin’s term.
From his early days in the Kremlin, he emphasized the need to honor Soviet conquests – notably his role in the defeat of Nazi Germany – and to minimize any parallels between Stalin’s terror and Hitler’s horrors. To ensure that the preferred version of the story prevailed, the Kremlin put pressure on historians, researchers and human rights groups that focus on the research and memory of the gulag.
Lobbying groups to help people like Shasheva have also come under increasing pressure. Memorial, the preeminent civil society group in the field, was declared a foreign agent in 2012. Yuri Dmitriev, a historian who discovered Stalin’s mass cemetery in northwest Russia, was sentenced to 13 years in prison on charges that many consider to be baseless. .
Shasheva’s quest to return to Moscow was also hampered by such efforts.
“The Russian government wants to control this topic,” said Nikolay Epplee, an independent researcher who has written a book on how governments deal with the sinister periods of history. “Anyone who does this independently is being expelled.”
In November, the lower house of the Russian Parliament debated solutions for people like Shasheva, but this led to complaints from some lawmakers that the victims of Stalin and his descendants born in exile were asking to skip the social housing queue.
The government ended up agreeing to a proposal that puts the families of the victims of repression in a 20-year queue.
Shasheva’s lawyer, Vaypan, is leading efforts to change the bill. His campaign to help the children of the gulag drew tens of thousands of supporters, including many civil society organizations.
Walking through the site of the former camp where his father was sent to work, Shasheva said he had no choice but to continue fighting to leave Nizhny Odes and go to the place she considers her true home, Moscow.
Despite living 800 miles away, Ms. Shasheva already considers herself a Muscovite. When she dreams of the city, she imagines herself lost in the whirlwind of busy streets.
“What I like about Moscow is how you can just walk through a crowd when it’s dark and see what’s going on,” she said. “I just want to feel the day-to-day. We don’t have it here. “
However, even if she manages to secure a place to live in Moscow, other concerns remain.
“I am still afraid that the repressions may return,” said Shasheva. “I realized that, deep down, all of us, victims of repression, have this fear entrenched inside.”