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- Memorial office (graffiti reads: ‘foreign agent’ USA’), Moscow, 2013. Photo Nanci Adler
Re-membering Memorial: The Ongoing Battle for Memory in Russia
At the end of December 2021, thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Procuracy of the Russian Federation decreed the liquidation of the International Memorial Society, a Russian NGO. Days later, its Human Rights branch was liquidated. This was the culmination of Memorial’s years of tug of war with the state on how the story of the Stalinist past should be told. This work focusses on the history and life (or as Russians would say, fate) of Memorial. It is based on, among others, over 30 years of field work in Russia, interviews with Memorial’s founders and constituency, and analysis and observation of the movement and the times in which Memorial operated, as well as the outcome of their mission. This study recalls its’ founders and constituency of Gulag survivors’ past analyses, aspirations, hopes, and fears.
Nanci Adlers research on Memorial started in 1988, when the civil society organization started gaining support for its mission of erecting a monument to the victims of Stalinism. In the period from 1987 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Memorial established an office in Moscow. It provided a reception room where Gulag survivors could come to share their stories and seek legal aid in applying for rehabilitation. Concurrently, it amassed an archive of thousands of memoirs, letters, and other testimonies, while branching out to over 200 cities across the Soviet Union. Furthermore, in 1990, it succeeded in establishing a monument to the victims of Stalinism.
The battle ahead for memory seemed manageable, indeed encouraging, given Memorial’s ability to survive and endure, even under the Soviet regime. What would remembrance look like a generation hence, for those who were born into the post-Soviet era? The dwindling cohort of camp returnees envisioned that the post-Soviet generation would be enabled to confront the crimes of the predecessor regime. With the hopes engendered by the fall of the Berlin wall, Eastern Europe’s reckonings with its Communist past, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, observers could not have imagined that within a little more than a generation, Memorial itself would become a victim of state terror.
