The chilling stories from vanished files. Part 3

Vitaly Shentalinsky died on 27 June 2018. The publication of the program in 4 parts is dedicated to his memory Until introduction of the policy of "glasnost", the fates of Soviet Russia's most prominent persecuted writers was hidden in the KGB files, and it was the writer, poet and journalist Vitaly Shentalinsky who brought the voices of disappeared writers of the Soviet Regime back to life. Vitaly carried out his search in the building at the infamous Lubyanka square, where the headquarters of the Cheka, later the GPU, NKVD, the KGB and now the FSB are located. Consequently, his books were illustrated with rare documents and photographs from the archives of the KGB. We meet with Vitaly Shentalinsky in Moscow in 2009 and he told us the story how he became chairman of the Commission for the Creative Legacy of Oppressed Writers, which conducted research for more than twenty years about persecution of a large number of Russian writers in the Stalin era. He told us, how he found the confiscated diary of Mikhail Bulgakov, fragments of the unfinished work by Andrey Platonov, a poem by Nikolay Klyuev . He also discovered a letter from theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold in which he tells how he was tortured during the interrogations. Now this letter is very widely known and quoted. The programs are illustrated by the songs of Alexander Galich, Soviet poet, screenwriter, playwright, singer-songwriter, and dissident.

Vitaly Shentalinsky Source: SBS

Source: Supplied

Source: SBS