Irina Scherbakowa

Shcherbakova was born in Moscow in 1949.[1] Her parents were Jewish communists. When she went to university, she studied German and earned 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 requested 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 Ossietzky Award, 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 labeled a "foreign agent" by the Russian Ministry of Justice. In 2017, Shcherbakova was awarded the Goethe Medal.[1]

Shcherbakova'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 while forgetting his human rights abuses, which claimed millions of lives.[5]

In 2022, Memorial, Russia's most respected rights group, was co-awarded the Nobel Peace Prize less than a year after it was ordered to shut down during a wave of repression against critical voices.[6]