Irina Scherbakowa was born in Moscow in 1949. She is a historian, publicist and translator. Towards the end of the seventies she began her collection of audio tape interviews with victims of Stalinism, and has been doing research in the archives of the KGB since 1991. She is Professor of Contemporary History in Moscow, belongs to the board of trustees of the Buchenwald Memorial in Weimar, and is a member of the human rights association ‘Memorial’. In 2005 she was honoured with the German order ‘Verdienstkreuz am Bande’.
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