“I should like to call you all by name”

“I should like to call you all by name” is the wish from Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem that the book makes a program for recovering suppressed memory. Quoted in connection with the Memorial Society, the phrase names a task larger than commemoration: to make those whom repression removed from public history present again as individuals.

The phrase and its source

The words belong to Requiem, and the book introduces them as Anna Akhmatova’s wish. Their force lies in the contrast between naming and erasure. To call the victims by name is not simply to acknowledge that repression occurred; it is to resist the disappearance of particular people into silence, official euphemism, or an anonymous total.

That distinction matters in the book’s account of Soviet history. The authorities could revise the public record as if events had never happened: after Beria’s fall, encyclopedia subscribers were instructed to remove his entry and substitute one on the Bering Strait. The same logic extended to memory in private life. Children knew that their fathers had been taken away, but also learned that speaking of it was dangerous and that it was safer to behave as if it had not happened. The wish to name the dead answers both forms of erasure.

Memorial and public remembrance

Under Andrei Sakharov’s patronage, dissidents founded the Memorial Society to identify victims of repression who had not only been killed but also removed from memory. Akhmatova’s sentence gave this work a human measure: the aim was not only to describe a system or establish a scale, but to call its victims back into public recognition one by one.

The group initially hesitated to use the word “millions.” Once it did, the word seemed to many as though it had been waiting to be spoken. The phrase’s personal insistence therefore sits beside a number almost too large to comprehend. Naming individuals does not diminish the scale of the crimes; it counters the way scale can itself make victims anonymous.

Truth against enforced forgetting

The phrase gains its historical urgency from the opening of public discussion during glasnost. Gorbachev called for the blank pages of history to be filled in, and from 1988 previously banned books appeared in public, often selling out in huge print runs. The reading frenzy and the work of Memorial were different responses to a common change: people could encounter accounts that had been kept from them and speak openly about what had happened.

In the book’s account, the recovery of memory challenges a political order that had demanded not only that people repeat falsehoods but that they learn to believe them. Akhmatova’s wish offers the opposite principle. Where official history could make a person, a crime, or even an entire period seem never to have existed, remembrance begins by restoring the possibility of saying who was lost. The phrase thus joins private grief to public testimony, and gives historical truth its most intimate form: a name spoken aloud.