Memorial International
Human Rights Society, Moscow
and the Preservation of Historical Memory
Memorial is an international historical and educational charity, set up in 1988 on a groundswell of public opinion from different generations. Its supporters had very varied biographies, and sometimes divergent political outlooks. They were not only former political prisoners and their families, but young people and others in favour of establishing a democratic state under the rule of law.
Memorial’s first chairman was Academician Andrey Sakharov. Today, Memorial is a network of dozens of organizations in Russia, Belarus, Germany, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia and Ukraine who conduct research and educational work and defend human rights. In 1991, on Memorial’s initiative and with the society’s participation, a law was passed on rehabilitation of victims of political repression. It declared 30 October a Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression.
From the outset, Memorial has considered one of its principal tasks to be the creation of a tradition of informed remembrance of political repression in the USSR. An essential part of this work has been collecting and preserving the testimony of over 4 million people persecuted during the Stalin era. In the course of twenty years, Memorial has established the only systematic public archive of its kind in Russia, museum holdings, collections of documents, and a specialized library.
Another aspect of the work is restoring and making publicly available the identities and biographies of victims. A Book of Remembrance provides the foundation for an electronic database of more than 2.6 million victims of political repression.
Memorial organizes discussions directly related to remembrance and analysis of current policy towards history.
The charity is constantly studying not only the means of transmitting historical memory from generation to generation, but actively encouraging this by organizing a nationwide history essay competition for older school students on the topic of ‘Man in History: Russia in the Twentieth Century’.
Memorial sees scholarly and research work as an integral part of its mission. Among its main projects are:
• creating maps of the Gulag and a definitive work describing the Gulag system;
• creating reference works giving the biographies of the organizers and perpetrators of the Terror;
• studying the role and significance of social-democratic opposition to the Stalin regime;
• researching the administrative structure and statistics of the Terror;
• studying sites associated with the topography of the Terror;
• studying family memories of the Terror;
• monitoring museum collections relevant to the history of the Gulag;
• studying the fate of different groups of victims of political repression, such as Poles, Germans, and Harbin Russians.
Memorial’s archival and museum collections
Memorial’s archive began acquiring materials from the very inception of the society in 1989, when victims of repression, their relatives and friends began passing documents, photographs and manuscript memoirs from their family archives to the movement’s activists. The archive consists of several themed collections.
Archive of the History of Political Repression in the USSR, 1918-56
The backbone of this collection is personal files of people who were persecuted: shot, sentenced to prison camp terms, exiled, or ‘dekulakized’ in the case of more prosperous peasants. The collection contains in excess of 60,000 personal archives. These consist of such materials directly related to the persecution as originals and copies of official arrest warrants, records of searches; pages from archival, criminal, prison camp or surveillance files; notifications of sentence, death certificates, certificates of release and rehabilitation; and such personal documents as lists of parcels sent to prisons and camps, and appeals by prisoners and relatives for a review of their case. There are also documents from the period of detention: character references, poetry, posters for camp amateur performances, certificates of good behaviour, home-made cards, sheet music, and personal notes.
Correspondence between prisoners and their families is of particular interest. This includes not only officially authorized correspondence, read and often with deletions by the censor, but also letters passed to the outside world illegally: snatches of news from prison trains in transit, notes scrawled on fabric or cigarette paper and hidden in the seams of clothing or in buttons. The personal files also contain documents from before arrest: birth certificates, school-leaving and degree certificates, membership cards of various organizations, service records, diplomas and award certificates, letters, family and work photographs, and the like.
Memoir and Literary Works Collection
The Memoir and Literary Works Collection contains some 600 files and represents a unique source of personal testimony about life in the USSR in the twentieth century, about arrests, investigations, camps, and exiles (the latter reflecting the entire history and geography of the Gulag). In addition to memoirs, the archive includes collections of letters, diaries, sketches and articles, and literary and journalistic works. Most of these texts have never been published.
Archive of the ‘Victims of Two Dictatorships’ Programme
This archive of materials, on the fate of Soviet people deported to perform forced labour in Germany during the Second World War, contains some 400,000 case files. Many of these people were subjected to harassment and persecution when they returned to the USSR. The files contain biographical information, letters and memoirs, documents issued by the German administration; documentation of their passage through ‘filtration’ when they were repatriated; data from Soviet state and ministry archives, as well as from the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross; personal papers (photographs, letters and postcards from Germany and filtration camps).
A database on individuals has been compiled, drawing on the archive’s holdings, which, among other things, gives information on where ‘Ostarbeiter’, slave labourers from the East, lived and worked in Nazi Germany.
Archive of the History of Dissidence in the USSR, 1953–87
Memorial’s collection of documents on the history of dissidence in the post-Stalin era is the largest in Russia and one of the most extensive in the world. It comprises seventy-four holdings and collections, as well as a photograph archive and collection of rare publications which appeared in very limited editions.
The holding comprises some 300,000 sheets of documentation. These include a collection of Samizdat works assembled by Memorial International. Personal collections and archives include letters, diaries, memoirs, drafts of articles, and other working materials of prominent dissidents, totalling about thirty personal files. The archive contains photocopies of around 13,000 index cards of prisoners sentenced in the 1950s to 1980s for political and dissident activities. The collection is an important source for research into oppositional social and political activity and the repressive policies of the USSR during this period. Samizdat and other materials connected with dissidence come in a variety of shapes and forms: typescripts, photocopies, home-made albums with illustrations. Some are truly unique: a letter from exile typed on cloth, a tape recording made secretly in the camp, and so on. The collection also contains some 5,000 photographs.
The Centre for Oral History and Biography
The Centre has ongoing projects on Women’s Memories of the Gulag and Children of ‘Algeria’ [the Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Fatherland, opened in January 1938], which have recordings of some two hundred interviews, as well as thousands of documents, photographs, memoirs, letters and diaries, depicting the fate of wives of ‘traitors to the fatherland’, who were sent off to the camps, and of their children, who were placed in ‘orphanages’. The collected materials and, in particular, the oral evidence, enable us to trace how the history of mothers despatched to the Gulag affected the destiny of their children, and to re-assess the traumatic experience of families under the Soviet system.
In the course of the projects Survivors of Mauthausen, and Forced Labour in National Socialist Germany, about three hundred audio and video interviews were recorded with former prisoners of concentration camps and Ostarbeiter, which portray the tragic vicissitudes of these people during the war and their long experience of discrimination in the post-war era.
The Memorial Museum Collection began to be formed as early as 1988. Along with documents, relatives of the persecuted brought memorabilia, drawings and photographs for safekeeping by Memorial, and in 1990 a museum was set up. The main source of acquisitions was families of the persecuted, which had kept relics, paintings and drawings; some of the exhibits were acquired on expeditions to the sites of former camps. The museum currently houses some 2,000 items. With 1,500 exhibits, this is the world’s largest collection of works created in captivity. The greater part of the collection is paintings and drawings by imprisoned artists: genre drawings, portraits, interiors, landscapes, and sketches for scenery and costumes for productions in the camp theatres. Some of them are by famous artists who ended up in the camps and exile.
Closely related to the museum collection are some 12,000 works in the photograph archive. These are originals or copies of documentary photographs depicting the history of political repression in the USSR from the 1920s to the 1980s, the life and labour of the prisoners of the Gulag, the everyday life of the USSR, and Soviet propaganda.
Address:
Memorial International
5/10 Karetny Ryad
Moscow 127006
Russia
tel. (+7 495) 650 7883
e-mail: nipc@memo.ru
websites: www.memo.ru; www.urokiistorii.ru
Pages from Ivan Chistyakov’s diary.