Jak to začalo - Rozhovory s ruskými emigranty – Pavlova Olga (2025)

The book presents a series of interviews with Russian emigrants, supplemented by the author's comments, quotes from contemporary Czechoslovak or later Czech press, and selected photographs from the respondents' archives.
The central theme of all the interviews is based on Varlam Shalamov's short story 'How It Began.' Shalamov, as explained by the writer, Slavist, and one of the respondents in the book, Luba Jurgenson, writes about how 'suddenly dogs appeared in Kolyma, suddenly guards appeared, suddenly one had to work sixteen hours to meet the norm, suddenly Trotskyists disappeared, etc. In reality, Trotskyists began to disappear even before that, just as the famine did not fall from the clear sky. In this story, Shalamov speaks of something else. He talks about how we suddenly notice that something has happened. Suddenly we begin to see something we did not see before. This is true for many people today, when the war in Ukraine suddenly began. But the war had been going on for eight years - and only now, after the 'full-scale invasion,' did they notice it.
The participants in this project recount their lives before and after emigration. Memories of everyday events form the core of the book, which, in the context of great history, does not answer the question of how it began, but brings the past of the Soviet Union closer and...