Every generation has its key people, through whose lives history will later be studied. Such a person was Euphrosinia Kersnovskaya (1907-1994). Before you are the drawings with which she illustrated her memoirs, a story full of experiences that were highly characteristic for this departing century. Unlike similar stories written by many others, her work records totalitarianism as seen through the eyes of a true European. The volume of this outstanding material is remarkable – 12 exercise books, from which have come 1400 pages of printed text and 700 illustrations, all fitting together as a unified whole. This is no ordinary retelling of the horrors of Stalin’s labour camps; much more, it is a clear and convincing demonstration that the destructive forces of the GULAG can be conquered by the strength of the human spirit.
Kersnovskaya was born in Odessa into a family which had aristocratic roots both in Poland and in Greece. She was given an excellent European education. After the Revolution the family escaped from the Bolsheviks by moving to Bessarabia (which was then part of Rumania); there they settled on their ancestral holdings. After her father died Euphrosinia took over the running of the farm, lifting it out of its state of decay by unrelenting effort. It flourished, and so the family was able to send her brother away to Paris for education. (He subsequently became highly respected amongst Russian émigrés as a war historian.) After the invasion of Bessarabia by the Russians in 1940 Euphrosinia and her mother were driven off the property, losing all the work of her hands.
Euphrosinia sent her mother off to Rumania, but she herself remained in what had now become a part of the USSR. In 1941 she was deported to Siberia, along with many thousands of other Bessarabians. She was placed in a lumber camp, from which she managed an escape that is unique in the history of the GULAG resistance. She passed through 1500 kilometres of the Siberian Taiga, observing en route how much destruction the Soviet authorities had wrought on the land. She was recaptured and given two successive prison sentences, during which she experienced what she calls the `Circles of Hell’ of Stalin’s camps.
Her upright and noble character enabled her to endure suffering beyond what any ordinary person could bear. In the mines at arctic Norilsk her first concern was not simply to survive at any cost but rather to preserve her dignity and independence. The result was ever harsher circumstances, from infirmary work to work in the camp morgue, and from there to the coalmines. Only there, in the depths of the earth, did she find real freedom, because “the scabs don’t venture underground”.
In 1960, Euphrosinia settled in Essentuki, a town in southwest Russia. By a miracle she was able to trace her mother after 18 years of separation, and brought her to Essentuki to live with her. But the happiness that resulted did not last long. Three years later, the old lady died in her arms, but not before extracting a promise from her daughter to record the story of her grim experiences. She set about fulfilling this promise wholeheartedly, out of love for her mother, and wrote her memoirs without a pause during 1965 and 1966.
Fate kept these memoirs from falling into the grip of the KGB. She sought out people who would keep them safe until a more favorable time. After extracts were printed in the Russian journal “Ogonyok” in 1991, that journal became a symbol for the Perestroika period.
The publishing of Euphrosinia Kersnovskaya’s work would be an important culmination for the twentieth century. “A country which does not know its past has no future” – as she loved to tell us. Now that there is a real risk of a Communist return to power, it is a timely moment for such a book. Thanks to the efforts of many private individuals, and with the help of funding by benevolent organizations, the memoirs are now ready to publish. It only remains to obtain further help from new sources for the printing of the book. Once this help is given, this prodigious work will certainly become a Russian national heritage.
Text from the booklet in 1998
