Memorial Society

The Memorial Society was founded by dissidents under the patronage of Andrei Sakharov to bring the victims of Soviet repression back into public memory. Its defining task was not simply to condemn past crimes, but to name people whom violence had killed and official history had then erased. In the book, the Society stands at the point where personal recollection, historical evidence, and public responsibility meet: the effort to recover what had been made unspeakable becomes part of a larger transformation in how the country could describe its past.

Founding and purpose

The Society emerged as glasnost loosened the restrictions on historical discussion. Sakharov’s patronage placed its work within the dissident tradition, while its stated purpose reached beyond the dissidents themselves: to identify the victims of repression, including those who had been killed and then removed from memory. The book compares this undertaking to Yad Vashem and connects it to Anna Akhmatova’s wish in Requiem: “I should like to call you all by name.” The line gives the Society’s work a precise moral and historical measure. The victims were not only dead; their individual existence had been suppressed by a system that treated disappearance from the record as a further form of disappearance from the world.

Naming what had been denied

The Society’s account of repression challenged a public history in which mass violence had officially not happened. The book describes how the collectivization of land, the deaths and deportations of millions of kulaks, the famine organized by Stalin in Ukraine, and the arbitrary killings and deportations of the purges had been excluded from the authorized story. Families might know that relatives had been taken away, but the danger of speaking about it taught people to behave as though the event had never occurred. That silence, repeated across generations, made the recovery of names a challenge to the whole arrangement of public memory, not merely an addition of details to an incomplete record.

At first the Society hesitated to use the word “millions.” Once it did, the word seemed less like a new claim than a truth people had been waiting for permission to say aloud. The change captures the Society’s particular role in the narrative: it helped turn private knowledge and scattered recollection into a publicly expressible account of the scale of repression. The book describes a sudden broadening of historical judgment alongside this recovery. Comparisons between Hitler and Stalin became common, and Stalin’s “5 percent theory” of repression and the words of his justice commissar, “We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more,” entered public argument as evidence of the system’s violence.

Glasnost and historical responsibility

The Society’s work took shape amid the rapid opening of historical discussion under Mikhail Gorbachev. From 1988, books previously available mainly to intellectuals through samizdat or smuggled foreign editions appeared openly in Russia. Large print runs sold out, and readers queued at kiosks and read works including Doctor Zhivago, Life and Fate, and 1984. This reading surge made suppressed history available to a public larger than the circles that had preserved it privately. The Memorial Society’s effort to identify victims belonged to the same transformation, but supplied a different kind of knowledge: not only the return of forbidden books, but the restoration of those whose lives and deaths had been excluded from the national account.

The shift also reached official speech. At the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Alexander Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s principal adviser, argued that Lenin had been the first politician to use the term concentration camp. Yakovlev later described the decree rehabilitating people persecuted since 1917 not as an act of clemency but as an admission of responsibility: “We are not pardoning them, we are asking their pardon.” His formulation made the silence of those who had looked away part of the moral reckoning. The book presents the speed of this reversal as striking: within less than two years of Gorbachev’s address on glasnost, claims once barred from official discourse could be voiced from an official platform. The Society’s naming of victims and the government’s language of repentance were distinct acts, but both depended on making the suppressed past speakable.

Public memory and political conflict

The Society also appears in the book as a participant in the unsettled political life created by that opening. Eduard Limonov and Colonel Viktor Alksnis were invited to a television discussion with democrats, former dissidents, and members of the Memorial Society. The encounter placed the organization among people publicly debating the country’s direction, not outside politics as a purely commemorative body. The book gives no account of the Society’s position in that discussion; its presence establishes the setting in which competing accounts of history and political legitimacy confronted one another.

Elsewhere, the narrator’s discovery that Anna Politkovskaya and Yelena Bonner defended National Bolshevik activists complicates his initial assumptions about Limonov and his followers. That episode does not establish a position taken by the Memorial Society, but it reflects the period’s unsettled boundaries between dissident credentials, democratic opposition, and movements burdened by authoritarian or nationalist associations. Against this background, the Society’s work has a significance beyond remembrance alone. Recovering victims’ names contests the suppression of historical reality, while the public debates surrounding the Society show that acknowledging past crimes did not settle every political disagreement that glasnost brought into the open.