Feminist and Familial Carceral Archives

Two months before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the NKVD records belonging to my paternal grandfather, Mikhail Zaionts (1905-1984) were released by the Ukrainian authorities. (The NKVD is the precursor to the KGB.) On February 28, 1936, Zaionts was arrested in Kyiv, indicted for “counter-revolutionary agitation,” and sentenced to three years in the gulag coal mines in Vortuka. His file was part of a large-scale release of NKVD and KGB records to surviving family members of the Great Terror. It was also a political counterpoint to the Kremlin. On December 28, 2021, the Russian Supreme court ordered the closure of International Memorial for violating Russia’s Putin-era “foreign agent” laws. The organization was known for its work in uncovering the history of political repression under Stalin. My paper seeks to move between the Soviet past and Putinist present and engage in a comparative analysis of familial and feminist carceral archives and their oppositional subjects. I will examine Zaionts’s secret service archive--which I have reclaimed as a "family" archive despite the ways in which it abstracts my grandfather--alongside the dissident archives of Nadya Tolokonnikova and Sasha Skochilenko. Tolokonnikova, a co-founder of feminist art collective Pussy Riot, and former political prisoner, and Skochilenko, a St. Petersburg queer artist currently on trial for her text-based anti-war action in support of Ukraine, have created archives of their carceral experiences. These archives range from personal accounts to deliberately defacing official state documents. Taken together, archive and activism will reveal the performances that authoritarian rule cannot contain.