Memories of Soviet trauma

In November 2004, Nona Panova was being interviewed by a researcher from the Russian human rights organization Memorial, working  on an oral history project about private life in the Stalin era.  Nona, a 75-year-old woman whose father had been arrested during the purges of the 1930s, had been talking for several hours about her upbringing in St. Petersburg and her family when she saw the tape recorder with its microphone and panicked.  Read full story here.