How do they live with their heritage? How do they choose between natural love and respect for their older relatives and the awareness of their personal involvement (in one way or another) in crimes? Psychologies columnist, great-granddaughter of army commander Iona Yakir and granddaughter of dissident Pyotr Yakir, watched the performance “Second act. Grandchildren.
“Second act. Grandchildren. The creators and artists of this unique performance – among them there are my good friends – called me to the premiere and to the following performances, but I put it off and went only to the penultimate show, afraid that I would never see the work of my friends. Now I understand, all this time I was afraid to go in panic. After Loshak’s film Anatomy of a Process about the Yakir-Krasin trial, a train of reflections followed me, the granddaughter of one of the dissident leaders Pyotr Yakir, for more than half a year*. The meaning was the same – I don’t want, I don’t want, I don’t want to know anything about this part of my history, “let me live without a name and without a family.” You can not want as much as you like – this will not change the story.
“Grandchildren” is about how not the grandchildren of the innocently repressed, but the grandchildren of the executioners live with their heritage. What they know, what they explain to children, how they share in their reality the knowledge that your grandfather or grandmother had a hand in other people’s deaths, and memories of what kind of people they were, because the executioners also had their own emotions, characters, preferences. They loved chocolate and went “to the country” – to the Gulag camps. They hurt, they loved, they had their own dramas and their own stories. They were people, just like us.
I am exactly the same great-grandson of the executioner, because my great-grandfather commander Ion Yakir was called “bloody Jonah” during the Civil War for the suppression of riots in Moldova and the execution of every tenth. But at the same time, I am the granddaughter of Petya Yakir, who spent 19 years in Stalin’s camps (he was imprisoned at 14) and was the inspirer of the dissident movement, then a traitor to it, who died of delirium tremens, whose memory is still procrastinated from various sides, ready to forgive and ready to brand.
Read more:
- Psychological trauma: how it is passed from generation to generation
It’s all the same – to be a descendant of those who killed, who were then killed by the next bricks from this wall. I know a family where the husband’s father once interrogated and sent his wife’s father to be shot, and then he himself was repressed. In Vnuki, the daughter of one such man, later shot, says: “I didn’t apply for rehabilitation, it’s impossible, what can’t be justified, then it’s impossible to justify.” The murder cannot be undone, and it is impossible to excuse yourself with the phrase “it was such a time.”
Once I worked in the State Duma of the Russian Federation, in the international committee, Molotov’s grandson Vyacheslav Nikonov also worked there. I don’t remember how it happened that he found out who my great-grandfather was, and somehow brought me a photograph from his archive – Molotov and Yakir next to me on the podium. I rummaged through our archives and found another, similar one. Exchanged, that is. They drank vodka together later at some committee drinking party. Words tried to speak to each other about history, which will judge everyone. So, “Grandchildren” is another reminder that no one will judge anything without your own reflection and your participation in this process. I don’t know how Vyacheslav Nikonov copes with his historical legacy, but for me it’s the vivisection of the soul, but it can’t be avoided, it can’t sit out, it can’t be injected and it can’t be forgotten. Unfortunately.
Those who did not lose any of their relatives in the meat grinder of repressions, as well as those who suffered or died, this theatrical project is equally important for everyone, because it brings us back to reality again and again – the issue is not closed, we did not have his Nuremberg.
*A. Loshak “Anatomy of the process”, the film was released on the Dozhd TV channel in September 2013.
The last repertory show of the play “Second act. Grandchildren” December 10 at the “Sakharov Center” at 20.00. You can sign up on the website:
“Second act. Vnuki” – this documentary theatrical project was created by Mikhail Kaluzhsky, a journalist and playwright, and Alexandra Polivanova, curator of the cultural programs of the Memorial society. Based on interviews with grandchildren (children, great-grandchildren – in a word, descendants) of those who are directly or indirectly guilty of the crimes of the Soviet state.