Nomination as an Agent of Change: Letters Written on Birch Bark in Siberia 1941-1965

In 2009 the nomination of the “Letters Written on Birch Bark in Siberia 1941-1965” was for the first time inscribed in the Latvian National Register of the “Memory of the World” programme. New items were added to it during the following years, including through an invitation to the other two Baltic states to work jointly towards achieving international recognition. In 2017 the multinational nomination was first submitted to the International Register of the “Memory of the World” programme and in 2023 for the second time, now also encompassing documents from Ukraine and Poland. The history of the preparation of the nomination is not only “tangible proof of evidence” to an endeavour of cooperation but, more importantly, a path and a showcase of how a nomination process to the International Register of the “Memory of the World” programme can serve as an agent of change. The idea of the nomination was initially proposed by director of the Tukums Museum, Latvia, Agrita Ozola in 2008. At that time the history of Soviet deportations was mainly approached as a collective memory, except for very few individual acts, with not much follow-up. The individual experiences of these deportations were little addressed, apart from uncertainty about how to approach and present individual agency within such a horrific past. Hence, when in 2009 Ozola invited various Latvian museums to work together to address this painful history through creating a collection of letters written on birch bark in Siberia, she unintentionally through her initiative and the work that followed, began a very complex yet healing process of reckoning with history. Her initiative sought to demonstrate by the letters on birch bark and missives they contain that these people were not merely objects of the regime (nor objects of the larger collective) but subjects who stood up for themselves and were agents of their own destiny.