Author(s): Eda H. TAN METREÅ
The period of 1930-1953 in Russian history contains not only the regime of Stalin and his liquidations, but also the World War II and following rocky roads. The liquidations, which had existed since the establishment of the Soviet Union, gained importance at the given dates as a method of the annihilation of the political opponents. Many people, declared “public enemy” by ideological defamation policy, were slaughtered in this period, but the family members were sent to the Soviet camps or turned into pariahs by the imprint of the public enemy’s relative. In this sense, “The House on The Embankment” which was built in the 1920s to meet the housing need of the statesmen, members and their families is an important memory space that has witnessed the process of liquidation in the country. This house, which gives a fear to its surroundings with its own strange story, keeps many stories behind its thick walls as the picking up inhabitants at the eleventh hour were not taken back home. This house, which symbolizes the pessimistic atmosphere of the period, has a repercussion in literature too with the namesake work of the writer Yury Valentinovich Trifonov who personally witnesses the living. In this study “The House on The Embankment”, which hosts the years of the great terrorism in 1937-1938 has been dealt with a socio-historical framework as a spatial focus that brings together the historical process and the individual fate bearing an age in itself.
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