By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
A Recipient of the 2021 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature
Our Publishing Perspectives readers will recall our June report that the Polish-American journalist, historian, and essayist Anne Applebaum has won this year’s €25,000 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.
This morning (August 12), the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, Germany’s publishers and booksellers association which administers the program, has announced that the Russian historian and human-rights activist has been chosen to deliver the speech honoring Applebaum.
The program is set for 10:45 CEST on October 20—Frankfurt Sunday—and is expected to be broadcast live on German public television (ARD) from Frankfurt’s Paulskirche.
Irina Lasarevna Scherbakova received the prize herself in November 2021 from Vera Michalski, the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, which was conferred on Scherbakova and the human-rights organization Memorial International along with Alena Kozlova, Nikolai Mikhailov, Irina Ostrovskaya.
Scherbakova was born to Jewish parents in Moscow. Having taken a doctorate, she worked as a translator of German-language fiction and as editor of the literary magazines Soviet Literature and Literaturnaya Gazeta.
In the early 1980s, she recorded interviews with survivors of the Gulag and in 1987 was a founding member of Memorial International, an organization that would go on to receive the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. Memorial advocated for a process of documenting, examining, and working through the crimes of Stalinism in the former Soviet Union.
Today, Scherbakova is among the best-known human-rights activists in Russia and the former Soviet Union.
Starting in 1996, she was active for 10 years as a professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. In addition to her work on the Gulag and Soviet camps on German soil, her key fields of research included oral histories, totalitarianism, Stalinism and policies of remembrance and cultural memory in Russia.
Among Scherbakova’s most important works in German are:
- Nur ein Wunder konnte uns retten. Leben und Überleben unter Stalins Terror (Only a Miracle Could Save Us: Life and Survival Under Stalin’s Terror), 2000
- Der Russland-Reflex: Einsichten in Eine Beziehungskrise (The Russia Reflex: Insights Into a Relationship Crisis), 2015
- Die Hände meines Vaters. Eine russische Familiengeschichte (The Hands of My Father: A Russian Family History), 2017
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the dissolution of Memorial International, Scherbakova left her homeland and moved abroad. Today, she lives in Berlin and Israel and is chairperson of Memorial Zukunft, an exile organization founded in Berlin.
Many of the films and books that draw on Scherbakova’s research have received awards, and her work as an academic has taken her on several extended research trips to Berlin, Vienna, Salzburg and Jena.
She’s on the board of trustees at the Buchenwald Memorial and also a member of the international council at the Berlin-based Topography of Terror Foundation and the nonprofit organization known as Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (Action Reconciliation Service for Peace).
Scherbakova’s awards include the Marion Dönhoff Prize in 2022. On that occasion, he German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, delivered the speech honoring the recipient.
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