Grandma’s Blanket

Hanging here is Maria’s grandmother’s blanket – the only object she has left from her maternal grandmother. Her grandmother came from Buryatia, yet her passport listed her nationality as Russian. The Buryats are an Indigenous people living near Lake Baikal who, following the collapse of the Russian Empire, unsuccessfully sought independence. Under Soviet rule, their traditional nomadic way of life was dismantled, and increasingly harsh Russification policies were imposed. Thousands of people were executed or imprisoned, including the national leadership and intellectual class. Buddhist monasteries were destroyed, and the Mongolian script was replaced with Cyrillic.

Maria’s grandmother, who was only twenty-one during the bloodiest year of the repressions in 1937, never spoke about her childhood and youth in Buryatia. Even the blanket displayed here is not handmade, but rather a mass-produced Soviet-era item. Industrialisation severed the intergenerational transmission of craft traditions and skills. Through embroidery and sewing, Kapajeva has added memories and sensations connected to her grandmother, along with questions she now wishes she had asked her. She writes in Russian – a language that is, on the one hand, her mother tongue and therefore deeply personal and intimate, yet on the other hand a colonial language through which her grandmother’s own language was erased.