Gleb Alekseev (1892 - September 1, 1938), born Gleb Charnotsky, was a Russian writer and journalist whose life was shaped by revolution, war, exile, and political repression. Born into the family of a rural schoolteacher of Polish descent, he began publishing in Moscow newspapers while still a teenager. During the First World War he served in the aviation corps and was wounded in combat. Rejecting the Bolshevik Revolution, he joined the White movement and spent the early 1920s in exile in Yugoslavia and Berlin before returning to the Soviet Union in 1923.

Aleksseev’s literary work reflects the upheavals of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, exploring themes of displacement, violence, and moral uncertainty. His prose, including the collections “Zhivaya Tup” (1922) and “Dead Run”(1923), established him as an important voice of the post-revolutionary generation. Despite publishing successfully throughout the 1920s, he became a victim of Stalin’s Great Terror. Arrested in 1938 on fabricated charges of participating in an anti-Soviet terrorist organization, he was executed later that year and posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.

Forced Omission #91

Anton Antonov-Ovseenko (February 23, 1920, Moscow - July 9, 2013, Moscow) was a renowned Russian historian, writer, survivor of Soviet repression, and a tireless advocate for human rights and memory.

Born in Moscow into a prominent revolutionary family, Anton was profoundly affected by Stalin’s purges. His mother was arrested in 1929 and died by suicide in prison. His father, the revolutionary Vladimir Antonov‑Ovseenko, was executed in 1938. Branded the “son of an enemy of the people,” Anton was expelled from the Komsomol and the Pedagogical Institute, despite being reinstated in the same year.

From 1940 onward, he was arrested three times (in 1940, 1941, and 1943) spending a total of 13 years in prisons and labor camps across Turkmenistan, near Volga, Moscow suburbs, Pechora, and Vorkuta. Released after Stalin’s death, he was fully rehabilitated in 1957.

Following his rehabilitation, Anton devoted himself to historical research and writing. Under the pseudonym Anton Rakitin, he authored biographies of his father, including “In the Name of the Revolution” (1965) and “Vladimir Antonov‑Ovseenko” (1975). In 1980, his critical study of Stalin, “Portrait of a Tyrant”, was published in New York, an act that led to renewed harassment by the KGB, including house searches and confiscation of his archives.

In 1995, Anton became the head of the Union of Victims of Political Repression for the Moscow region, and in 2001 he founded and became the first director of the State Museum of the History of GULAG, cementing his legacy as a guardian of historical truth and human rights.

Anton Vladimirovich Antonov-Ovseenko died on July 9, 2013, in Moscow, Russia, at the age of 93.

Forced Omission #35

Raissa Azarkh (May 2, 1897, Shcherbinovka - November 9, 1971, Moscow) was a Soviet writer, and military memoirist. She was one of the first women in Soviet Russia to be awarded the Order of the Red Banner in 1928.

Azarkh graduated from the medical faculty of Kharkov University in 1917 and participated in the October Revolution in Moscow that same year. She served as a commissar in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, holding various positions including head of sanitary units on the Ukrainian Front, chief of the sanitary service of the 5th Red Army, and chief of the Main Sanitary Directorate of the Transbaikal region. She played a pivotal role in combating typhus epidemics in Siberia.

In 1936 - 1937, Azarkh volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, serving as an advisor to the Republican Army and the Ministry of Health, and organizing sanitary units for the Republican forces. Following the Spanish Civil War, Azarkh continued her military service during the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland (1939) and the Soviet-Finnish War (1939 - 1940), serving as a representative of the People’s Commissariat of Defense of the USSR. During the Second World War (1941 - 1945), she worked as a war correspondent for several newspapers.

In 1947, Raissa Azarkh was arrested during the height of Stalin’s political purges, reportedly due to her association with Anna Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin’s second wife, who had fallen out of favor. Charged with political crimes, Azarkh was imprisoned and endured harsh conditions until her release in 1954 following Stalin’s death and the subsequent political thaw. Despite the interruption to her career and personal hardship, she remained committed to her work and continued writing after her rehabilitation.

Her notable works include “At the Great Sources” (1967), a memoir detailing her experiences during the October Revolution and the Civil War.

Forced Omission #75, 167, 168, 169

Isaac Babel (July 13, 1894, Odessa - January 27, 1940, Lubyanka Prison, Moscow) was a Russian-Jewish writer and journalist, acclaimed for his vivid short stories that explore themes of violence, identity, and revolution.

Born in Odessa, then part of the Russian Empire, Babel grew up in the Moldavanka district, a setting that would later inspire his “Tales of Odessa” (1931), depicting the Jewish underworld of his hometown. He also authored “Red Cavalry” (1926), a collection based on his experiences as a war correspondent during the Russo-Polish War, and “Story of My Dovecote” (1926), a semi-autobiographical work reflecting on his Jewish upbringing.

Babel’s literary style is characterized by its aphoristic precision and metaphorical richness, blending journalistic realism with modernist aesthetics. His works gained prominence in the 1920s, earning him the patronage of Maxim Gorky and recognition as a leading Soviet writer.

However, during Stalin’s Great Terror, Babel was arrested in May 1939, falsely accused of espionage and anti-Soviet activities. After enduring months of torture and a brief trial, he was executed on January 27, 1940, in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison. Isaac Babel was posthumously rehabilitated in 1954 during the Khrushchev Thaw.

Babel’s works have been translated into numerous languages and continue to be studied for their profound insights into the human condition amidst political turmoil.

Forced Omission #25, 152, 153, 155

David Bergelson (August 12, 1884, shtetl of Okhrimovo - August 12, 1952, Moscow) was a revered Yiddish-language writer and a pivotal figure in modernist Jewish literature. Born in the shtetl of Okhrimovo, near Uman (present-day Ukraine), Bergelson grew up in a traditional, prosperous Jewish household, receiving both religious and secular education in Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish.

He began his literary career writing in Hebrew and Russian, but found true artistic voice in Yiddish. His breakthrough came with his novella“At the Depot” in 1909. Later works like “After All Is Said and Done” solidified his reputation as a leading modernist in Yiddish prose. In 1917, he co-founded the avant-garde Kultur Lige in Kiev, promoting Yiddish culture and literature.

In 1921, Bergelson relocated to Berlin and later moved back to the Soviet Union in 1933, driven by ideological alignment and concerns about rising Nazism. His early writing reflected critical modernism, but by the 1930s he increasingly embraced socialist realism and became active in Soviet literary institutions. He joined the Jewish Anti‑Fascist Committee, contributing to its wartime publication, “Unity”.

However, during Stalin’s postwar crackdown on Jewish intellectuals, Bergelson was arrested in January 1949 in the antisemitic campaign against so‑called “rootless cosmopolitans.” Following a secret trial, he was executed on August 12, 1952 (coincidentally his 68th birthday) during the event known as the Night of the Murdered Poets.

After Stalin’s death, Bergelson was posthumously rehabilitated, and his works were republished in the Soviet Union starting around 1961.

Forced Omission #26, 50

Olga Berggolts (May 16, 1910,  St. Petersburg - November 13, 1975, Leningrad) was born to an educated family and began publishing poetry in her teens. In the 1930s, she worked as a journalist and editor, enduring devastating personal losses: the deaths of her two daughters and the execution of her first husband, the poet Boris Kornilov, in 1938 during Stalin’s Great Terror.

Later that year, Berggolts was arrested on fabricated charges of plotting terrorism and held for seven months. She was pregnant at the time and miscarried during a brutal interrogation. Her diaries were seized and annotated by interrogators. Despite torture, she never confessed to any false charges. Eventually, she was fully exonerated and reinstated to the Writers’ Union.

Her ordeal left deep scars. She later wrote: “They took my soul, dug in it with stinking fingers… spat on it, defiled it, and then gave it back and said, ‘Live!’”

During the Siege of Leningrad, Berggolts refused evacuation and became the city’s voice on Leningrad Radio, broadcasting poetry and hope to a starving population, her words serving as a lifeline. One of her phrases, “No one is forgotten, nothing