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– DACHA – museum is no longer about repression and the cruelty of forced labor, but about the timber production that made the WWII victory possible. History is reconstructed to bury crime. The painful past is not part of our public discourse. The official historical space being designed is of unmarked graves, unburied dead, and arrested collective mourning. Justifications of Stalin’s terror are loud and clear. Confusion. For the next generation it is already hard to imagine the evil which took place. What kind of world will they create? What kind form will the expelled past take in their private and public world? Will they ­recognize it? I can no longer live my life in a double absence. The gap of my private silence. The void being created by the current official refusal to acknowledge, remember and commemorate. Living in a different country and free society I ask myself to what extent I still exist in the land of ever-present melancholy and fear of being seen. I can find my way in the personal space of my past and collective history, but the public lacunae fashioned by the state I can no longer accept. I write this so as not to be a part of the hollow of my generation and the next, and of those not yet born. I want truth and reconciliation so that the past does not confine our present and future. 156
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– Dasha Shkurpela – SELECT REFERENCES Danieli, Yael, ed., International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma (1998) Gheith, Jehanne, M. I Never Talked: Enforced Silence, Non- Narrative Memory, and the Gulag, Mortality, Vol. 12, No. 2 (May 2007) György, Peter, Spirit of the Place: From Mauthausen to MoMA (2008) Harris, Adrienne, Margery Kalb, and Susan Klebanoff, eds., Demons in the Consulting Room. Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice (2017) Harris, Adrienne, Margery Kalb, and Susan Klebanoff, eds., Ghosts in the Consulting Room. Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis (2016) Lindy, Jacob D. and Robert Jay Lifton, eds., Beyond Invisible Walls: The Psychological Legacy of Soviet Trauma, East European Therapists and Their Patients (2014) Lowell, Stephen, Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710–2000 (2003) Rosenblum, Rachel, ‘Postponing Trauma: The Dangers of Telling’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 90:1319–40 (2009) 157

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– DACHA –

museum is no longer about repression and the cruelty of forced labor, but about the timber production that made the WWII victory possible.

History is reconstructed to bury crime. The painful past is not part of our public discourse. The official historical space being designed is of unmarked graves, unburied dead, and arrested collective mourning. Justifications of Stalin’s terror are loud and clear. Confusion. For the next generation it is already hard to imagine the evil which took place. What kind of world will they create? What kind form will the expelled past take in their private and public world? Will they ­recognize it?

I can no longer live my life in a double absence. The gap of my private silence. The void being created by the current official refusal to acknowledge, remember and commemorate. Living in a different country and free society I ask myself to what extent I still exist in the land of ever-present melancholy and fear of being seen. I can find my way in the personal space of my past and collective history, but the public lacunae fashioned by the state I can no longer accept. I write this so as not to be a part of the hollow of my generation and the next, and of those not yet born. I want truth and reconciliation so that the past does not confine our present and future.

156

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