The new book by the renowned and award-winning historian, publicist and writer Irina Scherbakowa

In her new book, Irina Scherbakowa tells of the brief years of perestroika. She reports on everyday life and the political upheaval in Moscow and the countryside at the beginning of the 1990s. She describes the unaccustomed freedom and how people learned to deal with it more badly than well. Scherbakova's subject is also her active political activity, which continues to this day, and Russia's seemingly unstoppable slide into dictatorship. Her impressive memories of Moscow are closely interwoven with the history of Russia in the 20th century and her lifelong fight against state terror and for remembrance.

Irina Scherbakowa, born in Moscow in 1949, is a historian and publicist. She has worked as an editor and translator of German literature. Since the early 1980s, she has conducted interviews with GULAG survivors and, since the founding of Memorial (1989), has headed the educational work of the Russian human rights organization, in particular the history competition. Research visits took her to Berlin, Vienna, Salzburg and Jena. In 2021, the Putin regime liquidated the NGO, and in 2022 Memorial was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with a Ukrainian and a Belarusian organization. In the same year, Sherbakova left her home country and now lives in Berlin and Tel Aviv. She is chairwoman of the board of the exile organization Zukunft Memorial, founded in Berlin, is a member of the board of trustees of the Buchenwald Memorial and an honorary member of the Centre for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin.

Moderation: Margarete von Schwarzkopf