The 2025 'Friuli History' Award to Irina Scherbakova

The history of the Soviet Union, reinterpreted through family history: "My Father's Hands: A Russian Family Story" (Mimesis), a historical, political, and autobiographical work by Russian historian and Germanist Irina Scherbakova, wins the 12th edition of the Friuli Storia National Prize for Contemporary History. The award was chosen by a jury of 360 readers, the largest in Italy for a nonfiction prize.

Irina Scherbakova's book received 55% of the votes, beating out the other two finalists selected by the Prize's scientific jury: Carlo Fumian with "The Invisible World Grain Market between the 19th and 20th Centuries" (Donzelli) and Gustavo Corni with "Occupied Italy 1917-1918. Friuli and Eastern Veneto from Caporetto to Vittorio Veneto" (Gaspari).

Co-founder of the Russian Memorial association, which won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, Irina Scherbakova intertwines Russia's history with that of her own family in her essay, beginning with the memories of her great-grandmother Etlja Yakubson. Her book spans a century of Russian history: from the Bolshevik Revolution led by Lenin, to Stalin's purges, to the wars of the Putin era. The award ceremony will be held in Udine on Monday, October 25.

The Friuli Storia Award is supported by the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Friuli Foundation, the Banca di Udine BCC, the Municipality of Udine, and Poste Italiane Spa. The scientific jury, chaired by historian Tommaso Piffer, is composed of Elena Aga Rossi, Roberto Chiarini, Ernesto Galli della Loggia, Ilaria Pavan, Paolo Pezzino, Silvio Pons, Andrea Possieri, and Andrea Zannini.

A significant new development in this year's edition is the imminent launch of initiatives promoted by the History Circle. The Circle, piloted in 2024 with over 1,200 readers, was created with the goal of establishing itself as a national reference point for history, offering quality content to hundreds of thousands of history enthusiasts nationwide. The History Circle will be presented to the public in October: it will include an online portal (www.circolodellastoria.it), a weekly newsletter with reviews, recommendations, and articles by Italian and international authors, and in-person and online initiatives.

Irina Scherbakova lives in Berlin and was born in Moscow in 1949, where she graduated in German studies and taught Oral History at the university. She has translated Franz Kafka, Heinrich Böll, and Christa Wolf into Russian. Since the late 1970s, she has conducted interviews with Gulag survivors, and since the early 1990s, she has researched the KGB archives in Moscow. She is a founder of Memorial, an association for human rights and the study of repression during the Soviet era, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. In her book, which won the 2025 Friuli Storia Prize, the focus is on the Scherbakovs: a Jewish family of Ukrainian origin who, between 1924 and 1945, lived in two rooms in the famous Hotel Lux, the Comintern hotel just steps from the Kremlin. Those rooms housed the secretaries of communist parties from around the world, gathered in the name of global revolution. The numerous photographs that accompany the story help us get to know members of the different generations of the family, including the author's father: his hands, marked by war wounds, evoke the fate of the many invalids and maimed people who crowded Soviet cities in the post-war period, before being slowly removed from the public eye.