The Children of Siberian Gulag

In the course of multiple eras of occupation, emigration and immigration, Latvia became a multicultural society. An important part of its population consists of "mixed families". Anita Licis-Ribak belongs to one

Neatgriešanās | no return - latvian museum of photography. 2018

of them. In 1981, when she was twelve, her family moved to Kolyma in the Soviet Far East. At that time, she perceived this as a deportation. Only after decades did she realize that they were not the first of her family to abandon home, travel to the unknown and adapt to extreme conditions. Various of her closest relatives had been deported to Siberian labour settlements at a very young age, a few decades earlier.

“NEATGRIEŠANĀS” weaves together these two apparently disconnected narrative threads with backdrop of the vast geographical territories of Siberia.The Children of Siberian Gulag and Evanescent Road series featured herechart the destiny of these two generations in the early Soviet occupation in Latvia (1940-1956) and in the 1980s, before Independence. Licis-Ribak’s photographs, in tandem with her family archives, diaries, and other records, reveal not just the history, contradictions and duality of a single family but the overall fate of Latvian society in the 20th century.

Children of Siberian gulag

I was already an adult when I became aware of the fate that had befallen many of the older relatives I knew so well as a child growing up in Soviet Latvia. Decades had already passed since they returned to Latvia from forced labour settlements in Siberia. They all had been sent away without a crime to report, without a trial, and without a return date. During their years in Siberia, many of them had been forced to work long hours in unimaginable circumstances, they had all been made to starve, and to watch many of their friends and family members perish. They were all children.

The events of that shocking past never made it to our history books, and did not come up during our family conversations. In the summer of 2009, after learning what had happened to my aunts and uncles, driven by the shared experience of childhood years spent in Siberia, and the sense of the loss of home, I paid them a series of visits during my brief trips to Latvia. I listened to stories of their lives during and after Siberia, and how they were faring the deep austerity times brought on by the recent recession in now independent Latvia. These photographs are the result of those conversations.