Moscow authorities and activists on Wednesday unveiled a commemorative plaque in memory of author and former Gulag prisoner Varlam Shalamov, who chronicled the horrors of Stalin-era forced labour camps but remained largely under appreciated in Russia.
Like fellow ex-Gulag inmate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, who spent nearly two decades in camps, wrote about humans pushed to the brink of endurance in the deadliest of Soviet-era prisons.
But despite his genius and poignant storytelling, Shalamov has remained in the shadow of the Nobel laureate Solzhenitsyn.
The local Moscow authorities unveiled a bronze plaque at a building where the writer lived for three years before his second arrest in 1937.
Shalamov’s sculptural portrait – the first monument to the writer in the capital – was presented on the day of remembrance for the victims of political repression following requests from historians and activists.
“When you read Shalamov you begin to realise how horrible the state is, how fragile man is,” Arseny Roginsky, head of the Memorial rights group, told AFP at the ceremony, calling him “one of the main writers of the 20th century”.
Alexander Rigosik, an expert on the author, said Shalamov was for a long time more famous abroad than in his home country.
“This plaque is a symbol that Russia is finally beginning to pay homage to him,” he said at the ceremony.
Shalamov’s prose was banned in the country during his lifetime but was still clandestinely distributed by dissidents.
His most celebrated work – a series of short stories dubbed ‘The Kolyma Tales’ – was only published in Russia six years after his death, at the peak of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika in 1988.
“No doubt he remains under appreciated,” Sergei Solovyov, another expert on the writer, told AFP.
“He is still regarded as a witness to prison life, while the poetic nature and existential meaning of his stories are not duly appreciated,” he said by phone.
‘Prison Corrupts’
Shalamov famously rejected Solzhenitsyn’s offer to write together what would later become known all over the world as ‘The Gulag Archipelago’.
While Solzhenitsyn believed that the experience of prison life could be positive as it purges a human soul, Shalamov argued that it only corrupts people.
“A human turns into a beast in three weeks of hard work, cold, starvation and beating,” he wrote.
Shalamov was first arrested in 1929 and sentenced to jail time in the Urals camps before returning to Moscow in 1932.
At the peak of Stalin purges in 1937, he was arrested for a second time and jailed for five years for “counter-revolutionary” activities.
In 1943, his term was extended by 10 year for “anti-Soviet propaganda” after he was overheard praising writer Ivan Bunin who emigrated to France before becoming the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933.
On Wednesday, Russia paid tribute to millions of victims of political repression, which became an official day of remembrance under late president Boris Yeltsin in 1991.
About 30 000 people were executed in Moscow alone in 1937 and 1938.
Of these, more than 20 000 were killed at the Butovo firing range in the south of the city, the largest Stalin-era execution ground in the capital.
Names of those executed in Butovo were read out loud in a day-long religious ceremony.
Although the Russian government acknowledged the horrors of the Stalin era, many of those who perpetrated the crimes went unpunished.
“Too little has been done to learn the lessons of the past,” Igor Garkavy, head of the Butovo range memorial centre, told AFP.
