'Generation 1956': Rebellion and protest of Soviet dissenters in testimonies of political prisoners of the Mordvinian camps, 1956-1968

in cooperation with Memorial International and Memorial St. Petersburg,
financed by the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship
Project duration: 01/2023 - 08/2024

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The archival project's aim is to make new archival materials available which reflect various forms and practices of protest and mechanisms of repression in the Soviet Union between 1956 and 1968. Beside this it preserves knowledge about political camps in Mordovian ASSR. Between 1956 and 1968, over 6,000 people were arrested on political grounds for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda or denigration of the socialist order. More than half of them were convicted in closed court trials during the waves of repression in 1957/58 under Nikita Khrushchev for protesting against the suppression of the Hungarian uprising, among other things. After Stalin's death, the Dubravlag camp complex was the only site in the Soviet Union where political prisoners were imprisoned until 1972. However, information and testimonies about the repression of those "proto-dissidents" and political prisoners of the so called "generation 1956" have hardly been included in research due to the fact that the Soviet human rights movement of the 1970s/80s has so far been given priority in the literature.

In the project, personal papers and criminal files political prisoners, who were imprisoned in the Mordvinian camps in the 1950/60s, which are kept in large quantities in the archive of the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, in the electronic archive of Memorial St. Petersburg and in the digital archive of Memorial Moscow, will be indexed. In FSO's archive, these are the holdings of Boris Vail, Ernst Orlovsky, Irena Verblovskaya, Olga Ivinskaya / Irina Emelyanova, Sergei Pirogov, Leonid Chertkov, Nikita Krivoschein, Boris Sosnovsky, Kirill Uspensky, Eduard Kusnetsov Nikolai Dragosh, Valeri Ronkin, Evgeny Vagin and Alexander Ginsburg. The close links between the collections, which are often split between the various institutions, will be taken into account during the cataloging process.

Project team:

Coordinator and academic support:  Dr. Manuela Putz