Apr 23, 2021
Slav Gratchev
CHARLESTON â What do the lives of free thinkers look like under an oppressive regime? In the 1960s and 1970s, a Russian professor named Viktor Duvakin set out to interview hundreds of artists, authors, and philosophers who survived the Russian Revolution, Stalinâs purges of the 1930s, and World War II, lest their experiences be lost over time to censorship and the threat of imprisonment. The resulting trove of knowledge was eventually locked away in a library by the KGB until after the Soviet Unionâs fall in the early 1990s â and the interviews remained unavailable to English-speaking audiences until only recently.