Read my article in Foreign Policy.

My great-grandmother has no headstone, no grave, not even a clear burial place. Tatiana Ivanovna Shatalova-Rabinovich was a socialist activist in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, but Joseph Stalin’s ruthless regime labeled her a “counterrevolutionary” and sentenced her to death. In March 1938, Soviet police officers at a secret site just outside Moscow shot Tatiana and dumped her body into a trench with thousands of others.

Files about these mass graves were only declassified after the fall of the Soviet Union, so from the time of Tatiana’s wrongful arrest in 1938 until the 1990s, my family didn’t know where and when she was killed.

But at 37 Pokrovka St. in the heart of central Moscow, a metal plaque installed in 2016 reads:

HERE LIVED
TATIANA IVANOVNA
SHATALOVA-RABINOVICH
MEMBER OF THE SOCIETY OF
POLITICAL PRISONERS
BORN IN 1891
ARRESTED 1/29/1938
SHOT 3/7/1938
REHABILITATED IN 1956

This postcard-sized memorial affixed to Tatiana’s final residence, now a nondescript apartment building, is the only acknowledgment of my great-grandmother’s life and death.

Published 8/5/23

Read my article in Foreign Policy.