Pravo no pamyat / The Right to Memory

Arseny Roginsky in Ludmila Gordon's Pravo no pamyat / Право но память / The Right to Memory (2018). Arseny Roginsky tells how he was born in the GULAG in 1946. My screenshot from YouTube.

Право но память
    RU © 2018 Ludmila Gordon. D: Ludmila Gordon. Cin: Mika Altskan.
    A documentary film. Monologue: Arseny Roginsky.
    English translation: Alexander Altskan.
    96 min
Premiere: Moscow & Perm, 30 March 2018, International Memorial Society.
Corona lockdown viewings.
A free access film on The Right to Memory website / YouTube.
Viewed on a 4K tv set at home, Helsinki, 16 May 2020.

“It is great happiness, to have memory.
But it is arduous work to keep it preserved.
My cause is the work of memory.”
– Arseny Roginsky

Introduction on the film's website: "The Right to Memory is an intimate portrayal of one of Russia's greatest public intellectuals, influential historian and human rights advocate, Arseny Roginsky (1946–2017)."

"In an eloquent and captivating monologue, Roginsky, a co-founder and long-term leader of the Memorial Society, former dissident and political prisoner, reflects on his life and his country’s past, present, and future."

"Оne year before his death, Roginsky revealed, for the first time on film, his innermost thoughts about his birth in the Gulag, the mechanism of mass terror, the historian's duty, and why his countrymen reject the memory of the totalitarian past." (Introduction on The Right to Memory website)

AA: Having read Benjamin Nathans's essay "Profiles in Decency" in The New York Review of Books (23 April 2020 issue) I decided to see Ludmila Gordon's film, the first of the two movies discussed in the piece. The other one, Meeting Gorbachev by Werner Herzog and André Singer, I hope to see, as well.

The Gulag theme is still seriously underrepresented in world cinema compared, for instance, with Holocaust cinema. Ludmila Gordon's movie is a distinguished contribution. It is quite simply the oral history of Arseny Roginsky, author, historian and co-founder and head of Memorial.

Just before his death he agreed to tell his life story on film. It is a devastating story of terror and persecution that has continued over generations, although there have been periods of hope such as the great rehabilitations during the Khrushchev Thaw and most remarkably during the Glasnost of Gorbachev.

It is a sober and lucid story with three great lessons that Roginsky wants to share: 1) don't get killed, 2) maintain self-respect and dignity, and 3) continue work. These kinds of lessons sound familiar from life stories of Nelson Mandela and other heroes of civil courage and disobedience. I have recently been reading Tolstoy and about Tolstoyanism, also relevant here. Roginsky mentions having written a study about the massacre of pacifist Tolstoyans in the context of the 1940s.

The film is divided into five chapters: 1) Place of Birth: SevDvinLag (The Northern Dvina Labor Camp), 2) Forbidden Memory, 3) They Will Be Free, IV Memorial, and V State and Individual. The focus is on the last chapter. The persecution was not about bad people terrorizing innocent people. It was about state terror, and that is the hardest part for Russian citizens to accept.

Because Roginsky did not belong to Komsomol and because he was Jewish, he was not allowed to study in the universities in Russia, but he managed to get into Tartu university where he studied under Yuri Lotman. Soon Roginsky became a dissident intellectual, active in publishing a samizdat journal called Pamyat (Memory) and inevitably landing into the Gulag himself.

The future looked bleak, but the hunger-strike death of the Gulag prisoner Anatoly Marchenko in 1986 changed everything. Practically all political prisoners were set free by Gorbachev. Marchenko's "death was a powerful catalyst". Roginsky gives a resume of the achievements of Memorial. Its significance is huge, since "half of the people of the country do not know where their great-grandfathers are buried". Mass killings leave little traces, and finding out about them is a fight against time.

There are thousands of stories to be told about Gulag, also regarding Finns. Gordon and Roginsky's movie provides a model of how such a story can be told soberly and unflinchingly.

ПРАВО НА ПАМЯТЬ

ДОКУМЕНТАЛЬНЫЙ ФИЛЬМ, РЕЖИССЕР ЛЮДМИЛА ГОРДОН

"Это великое счастье, когда память есть.
Но хранить её – трудная и огромная работа.
Моё дело – дело памяти."
- Арсений Рогинский


«Право на Память» - документальный кинопортрет
российского историка и правозащитника Арсения Рогинского (1946 - 2017).
Это монолог-откровение Рогинского о себе и своей стране, о прошлом, настоящем и будущем России.

Многолетний лидер и один из создателей Общества «Мемориал», авторитетный историк, бывший диссидент и политзаключенный, Рогинский был замечательным рассказчиком. За год до смерти, впервые перед кинокамерой, он поделился мыслями об очень личном и важном для него: о своем рождении в ГУЛАГе и гибели отца в сталинской тюрьме, о сути массового террора, о долге историка и о том, почему его соотечественники отторгают память о тоталитарном прошлом страны.


Монолог АРСЕНИЙ РОГИНСКИЙ
Режиссёр ЛЮДМИЛА ГОРДОН
Кинооператор ​ ​МИКА АЛЦКАН
2018, 96 мин.