Marianna Yarovskaya

Filmmaker Marianna Yarovskaya directed and produced UNDESIRABLES, (1998) which won a Student Academy Award (Student Oscar), a College Emmy Award and screened at Cannes. She worked as a Producer and Senior Editor for Discovery Channel, National Geographic TV, History Channel, NASA, and for Greenpeace USA (Washington, D.C. office). Marianna's film, HOLY WARRIORS, about soldiers turned priests, played in 35 festivals and won numerous awards. She was a researcher on KINDERTRANSPORT (1999 Academy Award) and SAMSARA (2012, by the creators of BARAKA). In 2006 she was Head of Research for Al Gore’s AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, which won an Academy Award. She holds an MA in Journalism from the Moscow State University and an MFA in Film/TV Production from the USC School of Cinematic Arts. YAROVSKAYA: “In my own family and among my family friends I know of many heart-wrenching examples. Georgi Zzhenov, the author of the book “The Sleds,” and a People’s Actor of Russia, was in the camps for 20 years. In the title short story of the book, “The Sleds,” he wrote after his rehabilitation, how a package with food arrived at his labor camp from his family. He was told to travel to the region’s center to pick it up with a convoy, if he wanted to get it sooner. He was so emaciated and sick that he was almost certain to die on the way: in -76 Fahrenheit cold. He prepared himself for days and finally agreed. His guard went with him, taking the sleds (just in case, for the package, as he explained). On the way to the center, Zzhenov collapsed. Then his guard put him on the sleds and proceeded with the trek. Zzhenov understood why the sleds were taken in the first place. When they arrived at the center, the package turned out to be a gray frozen blob of bread, rotten vegetables, garlic, and spoiled food. The package had traveled for six months before it finally reached the destination. Nevertheless, the people there helped Zzhenov break it down into small pieces with a hammer and he ate them carefully, in small portions, and thus his life was saved. This is a real account of someone who was a family friend, and died just last year. He was later rehabilitated and given a People’s of Russia Actor title and published many books. Every Russian knows his name and the films in which he appeared. His book, “The Sleds” – was autographed to me with an inscription – “To my beloved Mariannochka.” Unfortunately, Georgi Zzhenov died a few years ago, which emphasizes the urgency of the project. We must document their testimonies before it is too late, this is our last chance. PRODUCER :PAUL RODERICK GREGORY, PH.D. Research Fellow, Hoover Institute, Stanford Paul Gregory, a Hoover Institution research fellow, holds an endowed professorship in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, Texas, and is a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin. The holder of a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, he is the author or coauthor of twelve books and many articles on economic history, the Soviet economy, transition economies, comparative economics, and economic demography including recently released, Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina (Hoover Institution Press, 2010), Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives (Hoover Institution Press, 2008), The Political Economy of Stalinism (2004), Before Command: The Russian Economy from Emancipation to Stalin (1994), Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy (1990, reissued 2006), and Russian National Income, 1885–1913 (1982, reissued 2005). He has edited Behind the Façade of Stalin's Command Economy (2001) and The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag (2003), both published by Hoover Press and summarizing his research group's work on the Soviet state and party archives. "My father fled the Siberian city of Chita before the advancing Red Army. He, like many others from Chita (a hub of the Tran Siberian) worked as a teenage telegraph operator on the Chinese Eastern railway in Kharbin. He contemplated returning after the civil war ended but traveled East to Tokyo and then to San Francisco. Maria Ignatkina’s engineer husband worked alongside my Grandfather on the Tran Siberian railroad. The story of the Ignatkin family is what would have happened to my father had he made the mistake of returning to Russia as did many of the Kharbintsy who accepted Stalin’s invitation to return to build socialism in the fatherland. As a historian at the Hoover archives, I have read Stalin’s decrees “About the Returning Kharbintsy” which condemned them to death upon their return."

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