Irina Scherbakowa, born in Moscow in 1949, is a historian and publicist. She worked as an editor and translator of German literature. Since the early 1980s, she conducted interviews with GULAG survivors and, after the founding of Memorial in 1989, headed the educational work of the Russian human rights organization. In 2021, the Putin regime liquidated the NGO, and in 2022, Memorial, along with a Ukrainian and a Belarusian organization, received the Nobel Peace Prize. In the same year, Scherbakowa left her home country and now lives in Berlin and Tel Aviv. She is the chairwoman of the board of the exile organization Zukunft Memorial, founded in Berlin, belongs to the Board of Trustees of the Buchenwald Memorial, and is an honorary member of the Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin.