Larissa Zakharova (1977–2019)

A Historian in History

Larissa Zakharova was made to be a historian, yet she became one almost by accident—by chance, one might say—a biographical illusion that may not be so illusory. She was born in the Soviet world that would become her object of study, raised between a workers' village near Leningrad and the city of Kronstadt, so closely related to the mythology of October and its aftermath, the uprising of 1921—a place where the complexities of Soviet history, in reality and in popular perception, are inscribed par excellence.¹

Zakharova's family history is deeply scarred by several key moments of Soviet history, incidents of violence that punctuated the years from the revolution to the mid-1950s. One of her grandfathers narrowly escaped death during the Kronstadt uprising of 1921. According to the family's memories, after the revolt was crushed, he took his place in a row of soldiers, one in ten of whom were to be shot. He was the ninth, and the tenth was one of his close friends. He thus escaped execution. In another instance of the USSR's violent and dramatic history, one of Zakharova's aunts, who ended up in Germany during World War II, married a Polish man she met in a displaced persons (DP) camp. She and her future husband then invented a Polish and non-Soviet past, so that they would not be forcibly repatriated to the USSR. The aunt settled in France, where she maintained a close correspondence with her sister until the KGB warned Zakharova's father of the dangers inherent in such relationships with foreigners. Zakharova's parents destroyed all the letters they had received from France, and the correspondence was interrupted.

Zakharova's connections with France and her future internationalization were thus already established. At that point in time, she did not realize that her mother's fascination with this country and her familial ties with the outside would, a few years later, bring her closer to France before she went there to study and to work. The importance of correspondence is also essential to her Soviet story: correspondence with family members abroad but also within the Soviet Union. She maintained such a correspondence for years with her grandmother, to whom her last book, completed shortly before her death, is dedicated: "To my grandmother (1932–1994), who wrote so many letters to me."

Nor does Zakharova's inscription in Soviet history stop there. Her family did not suffer as a result of dekulakization or the Great Terror, but her other grandmother was arrested after the war because her first love, with whom she no longer had any relationship, was detained for having fought for General Anders's Army. A neighbor denounced Zakharova's grandmother because of her past connection with this man, and as a result, she was deported to the Altai, where she lived for several years.

All the complexity, violence, and paradoxes of Soviet history were therefore present in the family narrative, leading Zakharova to question history, as she did so well, with relevance and inventiveness. Through her intimate knowledge of Soviet society, she constantly sought to escape the commonplaces of historiography. She examined, attentively and kindly, a society that had been affected by a violent history yet found a way to reinvent itself and overcome its past. Through her appreciation of nuance, she sought to escape the binary models of resistance or loyalty to the regime.² Her goal was to give voice to ordinary citizens, neither heroes nor cowards, who were trying to make sense of their lives and whom she saw as meriting historiographical rehabilitation.

Zakharova, however, did not at first intend to become a historian. She thought about being a dancer, then an actress, and even auditioned at the Theater Institute (Sankt-Peterburgskaia gosudarstvennaia akademiia teatral´nogo isskustva). She studied in Kronstadt before beginning her university studies in 1994 in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Herzen State Pedagogical University in St. Petersburg. She hesitated between studying the law, more promising in terms of future employment, and history. She used to say that...