"Memorial" is an association established in Moscow after the USSR collapse, whose coworkers are a group of historians studying the years of Soviet Terror and exerting tremendous efforts to recover the materials documenting the political repression. Its activity is internationally acknowledged, as shown by the nomination for the Peace Nobel Prize in 2007 and 2008, but it is opposed in the home Country.
Officially, the operation was caused by the alleged "Memorial" funding of the opposition newspaper “Novyj Peterburg”, shut by the governmental authorities in 2007 for “incitation to hatred” and for its support to the antiPutin demonstration which witnessed the repression on the side of the special police forces and the arrest of many participants.
To:
Dmitrii Medvedev, President of the Russian Federation
Valentina Matvienko, Governor of St Petersburg
Ella Pamfilova, Chairwoman of the Presidential Human Rights Commission of the Russian Federation
Vladimir Lukin, Russian Federal Ombudsman for Human Rights
Minister of Internal Affairs, Rashid Nurgaliev
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov
Yuriy Chaika, General Public Prosecutor of Russian Federation
Sergey Romanyuk, Public Prosecutor of Leningrad region,
5 December 2008
We, the signatories of this letter, members of the British and American
scholarly community, wish to express our deep concern at the actions of
members of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of St Petersburg on 4 December
2008 during a raid of the premises of the Research and Information Centre
“Memorial” in St Petersburg, ul. Rubinshteina 23-105, which resulted in the confiscation of the Centre’s electronic archive.
RIC “Memorial” is renowned for its research into the history of repression
under Stalin, the phenomenon of the Gulag and unofficial movements of the
1950s-1980s in the USSR. The staff of RIC “Memorial” helped to establish the
fate of many thousands of people, citizens of the USSR and other countries,
who fell victim to the repressions during the 1930s-1950s. Many of us know
members of RIC “Memorial’s” staff in person or have used the organisation’s archive.
A total of eleven hard drives were confiscated. These drives hold several databases containing: biographical information on more than 50,000 victims
of Stalinist repression; the results of the search for execution and burial sites of victims of repression (several hundred sites described or photographed); the photo collection (over 10,000 photographs) and accompanying textual material of the “Virtual Gulag Museum”, which is a unique online source linking more than one hundred local Russian museums. Also confiscated were the database to the oral history archive and an electronic collection of photographs, including scans of historic materials from private archives. What is more, the prosecutors took a hard drive and documents belonging to the art historian Aleksandr Margolis, a member of “Memorial” and the director of the “International Charitable Foundation for the Renaissance of St.Petersburg-Leningrad”, who is known for his commitment to the preservation of St Petersburg’s historic architecture.
The scholarly community fears the loss of a unique collection, which has
been amassed over the course of more than twenty years of dedicated
research. This collection is of priceless value for future generations of
researchers in both Russia and the wider world and must not be compromised or destroyed.
We are dismayed at the way the results of scholarly research and researchers are being treated by the authorities of St Petersburg and urge you to take action to ensure the electronic archive is immediately returned to its rightful owners.
Yours sincerely,
[most recent signatories]
Prof. Jeffrey Brooks
Professor of Russian History
The Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore MD 21218
Grace Morsberger, PhD Slavic Languages and Literatures,
UC Berkeley
Robert Chandler, Poet and Translator,
editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida.
Professor Natalia Pylypiuk, PhD,
President of the Canadian Association of Slavists (200004),
Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alverta,
Canada
Subscribe to the appeal by sending this email to Orlando Figes
Update
The end of the "Memorial case".
On 6th May all material was given back to the Research Center in its perfectly complete form. A contribution to the happy end of these happenings was given by the wide echo the case had outside the Russian borders, and by the many protest letters sent to the Russian institutions. We thank all those who adhered to the appeal.
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