Alexey never knew his grandmother, and knows about her only from short conversations with other relatives. His family wasn’t informed of Vera Guseva-Romanovskaya’s death. Her daughter, Alexey’s aunt, continued to bring food parcels to the prison for another year. She only heard about her execution in 1989. Alexey tells me his family tried not to talk about his grandmother, especially his father, her son.

“During the Soviet period, neither my father nor my aunt wanted to bring up what happened. The politics of our country didn’t encourage discussion. There were photos of her at home. We knew that this person had existed. But my dad didn’t want the issue of a repressed family member to rebound on him, his children, his job: he was a faculty head at a construction industry institute. The authorities could have reacted badly. After his death, however, his sister was able to give us some insight into family history.”

In 1989, Alexey and his aunt contacted the KGB Archive, where staff showed them the papers relating to Vera’s case and allowed them to take her ID papers and photos.

“We leafed through the documents, they wouldn’t let us photocopy them,” Alexey tells me. “It was all too brief and superficial. When it’s a close family member, you get all wound up – it’s hard to remember all the information.”

Vera was posthumously rehabilitated that same year – 61 years after her execution – on the request of Alexey’s father and aunt.

The next time Alexey accessed the archive was 26 years later, after Ukraine passed a law on access to security service archives in 2015. Gusev spent a week hastily compiling a 60-page document from all the files relating to his grandmother’s case, and he is now continuing his historical investigation with the help of his son: the aunt with whom he began his quest is no longer alive.

The archive revolution

Formally, the Soviet archives where Gusev found his grandmother’s case became the property of Ukraine’s Security Services in the 1990s. In 2015, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law on “access to archives of the repressive organs of the Communist totalitarian regime of 1917-1991”, which simplified access to documents.