In Russia, relatives of people who suffered from Soviet deportations and political repression are still trying to obtain archival records, even though access has become more difficult in some regions. Ahead of October 30, the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression, two women described how they managed to reconstruct their families’ histories.
A family story from Kalmykia
Elina Ulyumdzhieva, a resident of Elista, says her grandmother Tsagan was among 93,000 Kalmyks deported to Siberia in December 1943 during Operation Ulusy. After the German occupation, the Kalmyk ASSR was abolished and its population was accused of collaborating with the enemy. Tsagan, then 23, was sent to a special settlement near Abakan, where she later married a Kalmyk фронтовик who had returned from the war. Both parents soon died because of harsh living conditions and hunger, and their son Alexei was raised by his stepmother.
According to Elina, her father spent his entire life trying to learn what his biological mother looked like. After the collapse of the USSR, he repeatedly contacted archives but got nowhere. Only in 2022, when Alexei was 76, did the Novosibirsk Interior Ministry send him Tsagan’s file with a small black-and-white photograph.
“For the first time in his life, he saw what his mother looked like. He was shocked and cried,” Elina said. After the image was digitized, the family could make out her features, and Elina realized she closely resembled her grandmother.
The case of Maria Kozitsyna
Viktoria Morozova, from Perm Krai, received in 2024 the case file of her great-aunt Maria Kozitsyna and a photograph taken after her arrest from the United State Archive of Chelyabinsk Region. The Kozitsyn family had moved to Chelyabinsk in 1930, where Mikhail Kozitsyn built a career and eventually headed the city council. In 1937, however, he was accused of “sabotage,” with failures in city construction projects linked to alleged Trotskyist activity, and he was executed in November that year.
In the summer of 1938, the NKVD arrested Maria, accusing her of concealing her husband, labeled an “enemy of the people.” She was sentenced to three years in a labor camp, her youngest son was sent to an orphanage, and the older children were sent to relatives. Despite the relatively short sentence, she was able to return to her family only after 19 years. Later, a military prosecutor concluded that her confession had been drafted in advance by an investigator and signed under coercion, after which the case was closed for lack of evidence of any crime.
“She was 38 in the photo, but looked much older. When the file arrived, the whole family cried over that photograph,” Viktoria said, adding that the relatives had long remained unaware of the full circumstances of her imprisonment.
The women say that searching for the truth about repressed relatives often takes decades. At the same time, archival documents make it possible not only to confirm the facts of persecution, but also to restore the memory of people whose lives were hidden by the state for many years.