Educators, students in Central Asia slam censorship scandal at Russian school

ALMATY -- A teaching scandal in Russia over Joseph Stalin's Soviet-era repression has shocked educators in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan -- two countries that suffered greatly under Stalin's rule.

Serafima Saprykina, a teacher at School No. 168 in St. Petersburg, said she was forced to resign after reading to her older pupils poems by Aleksander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms, two Russian writers who were victims of repression by Soviet authorities.

Vvedensky was arrested in 1941 and died that year on a train carrying prisoners from Kharkiv to Kazan. Kharms also was arrested in 1941 and starved to death in a psychiatric hospital in 1942 during the Nazi siege of what was then called Leningrad.

The school principal, "her face twisted terrifyingly in anger, ordered me to resign" for reading poems by "enemies of the people", Saprykina wrote on Facebook February 6.

"In the principal's words, these people deserved to be picked up by the NKVD [People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the main police agency of the Soviet Union at the time] and tortured to death for their 'crimes', and their poems can be discussed only 'in your bohemian kitchens'," she said.

Saprykina said she was forced to resign to avoid a firing for a "loss of trust", which would have made it hard for her to find another job.

"If we don't talk about situations like these, if we don't call evil by its name, then guess what, this is 1937 all over again, one step closer to us and our children," Saprykina wrote.

The incident sparked criticism across not only in Russia but also in neighbouring Belarus and Ukraine for the "Soviet" mentality of the school administration.

Slandering the victim

Others, however, sought to ruin Saprykina's reputation.

Russian media alleged that Saprykina stabbed a drunk assailant 13 years ago during a party with friends and received a suspended sentence for causing grievous bodily harm.

The radio station of the Kremlin-backed newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda issued its own verdict on February 9, saying that as a former criminal, Saprykina had no right at all to work with children.

In a February 9 interview with the St. Petersburg news site Fontanka, Saprykina denied ever being on trial and as evidence shared a certificate issued in July by the Interior Ministry (MVD) stating that she had no criminal record.

In her next Facebook post she wrote that law enforcement agencies had "fabricated the case".

"I feel bad that because of what happened to me -- because I told the truth -- they decided to underhandedly shut me up with these crime capers (it reads like a detective novel), and for the next 20 years or so, other people will be afraid to open their mouths," Saprykina said, urging others not to be afraid.

"Someone will have drugs planted on them; someone else will be accused of pedophilia. But thinking people won't believe it."

'Atmosphere of repression'

Educators in Central Asia, where school curricula address the lives and works of writers and poets who were purged under Stalin, supported Saprykina's plight for the truth.

"I've often read in the papers about how the Russian authorities persecute opposition politicians, but why would they act this way with teachers and create an atmosphere of repression in schools, where objective knowledge is more important than politics?" said Gulbakhyt Dikhanbayeva, a computer science teacher at Middle School No. 4 in Japek Batyr, a village in Almaty province of Kazakhstan.

"It's unbelievable that in Russia in 2022 there are so many 'ideologues' -- followers of the dictator Stalin's regime," she said.

Aida Eshmatova, who teaches Kyrgyz language and literature in a Kyrgyz-Turkish high school in Bishkek, also expressed surprise that modern Russian schools still use expressions like "enemy of the people", which were left behind with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"It seems like the 1930s are coming back to Russia, and that's very alarming," she said.

Many Kyrgyz writers and poets experienced the horror of Stalin's repression and were labelled "enemies of the people", she said.

Such trends of supporting Stalin's regime will persist in Russia until "power changes hands and a progressive politician takes control of the country", said Bakhrom Khaidarov of Tashkent, an economics student at the National University of Uzbekistan.

"I'm sure that people there are tired of the old guard of politicians who have fallen far behind modern principles and values," he said.

An open wound

Across Central Asia, Stalin's repression is still an open wound.

Thousands of members of the intelligentsia living in the region who fought for the ideas of national identity were executed by the Communists as "enemies of the people", and millions more residents perished from hunger in the wake of forced collectivisation in the 1930s.

Exact figures of the Stalin-inflicted death toll throughout the former USSR are impossible to compile.

Some estimates put the number of executions between 1921 (several years before Stalin seized all power) and 1953 (Stalin's death) at 5.5 million. Other estimates are even higher.

In Kazakhstan alone, estimates suggest almost a third of all Kazakhs perished as a consequence of Stalin's policies.

Meanwhile, about 40,000 Kyrgyz might have been executed during the Stalin years.

Every November 8, Kyrgyz gather at the the Ata-Beyit (Grave of Our Fathers) Memorial Complex to commemorate those who perished under the Soviet regime. The date formally became a day of remembrance in 2017, but it had been observed as such for years.

Since 1997, Kazakhstan has honoured its own victims of Stalinist terror every May 31.