Notebook: Memorial, Memorials, Memory, History (Part I)

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

Last week, the Russian Supreme Court ordered the “liquidation” of Memorial, a group identified even by Russian President Vladimir Putin just a few weeks before as “one of the most reputable organizations” advocating for human rights in Russia. Memorial began in the dawn of Russian liberalization, in 1987, as a petition by a group of young people to erect a monument to “victims of Stalinist repressions,” many of whom had not at the time been officially recognized, and many of whose families could not even speak of their experiences, which included remote deaths never acknowledged, bodies never found, graves never identified. It quickly evolved into a “historical and educational society,” holding meetings amidst the burgeoning de-censorship of the moment to debate historical issues, appointing beloved physicist and human rights advocate Andrei Sakharov as chairman, and eventually creating an archive, research center, and public library documenting the formerly cloaked history of Soviet repressions. Memorial’s database of victims of political terror now includes over 3.1 million entries, a figure that researchers believe still represents only a fraction of the total.