The Scientific-Informational and Educational Center Memorial (SIEC Memorial) was founded in 1989. From the outset, the Centre aimed to restore historical memory about the victims of political terror in the USSR independently of the state and government institutions. Its goals have included recovering the names of the wrongfully convicted and preserving the memory of state terror as an essential and integral part of the history of Russian—and not only Russian—society.
One natural outcome of Memorial’s work was the development of an archive as a repository of personal and family memory about life and individual fates during the era of terror. With no access to official sources, SIEC “Memorial” began to collect private testimonies and documents to tell the story of political terror and resistance through specific personal experiences, affirming the value of the individual and, consequently, the value of personal archives and personal memory.
The years 1989–1991 can be described as a time of spontaneous archive formation. As a civic organization, Memorial quickly gained recognition across the country. Local organizations emerged in various cities, where people brought documents and filled out questionnaires about the fate of their repressed relatives. One particularly important event was the “Week of Conscience”—an exhibition accompanied by a series of meetings, lectures, and roundtables—where people freely shared information about persecuted family members. The documents, photographs, stories, and letters collected during this period became the first materials in the archive.
In 1991, Memorial's archive received a permanent space in Maly Karetny Lane in Moscow, and systematic description of the collection began. This made possible sustained work with contributors to the archive. A public reception office was established where staff helped individuals find information about repressed relatives, obtain rehabilitation documents, and receive legal advice under the rehabilitation law. A “Letter Group” handled inquiries from across Russia. Around the same time, a focused collection effort on the history of dissent in the USSR was launched with the support of the “History of the Dissident Movement” research program.
Over 30 years, the archive has grown to include tens of thousands of files on victims of repression, more than a thousand memoirs, hundreds of major personal and family collections, and dozens of collections from researchers of the history of the GULAG and the USSR.
The archive’s key areas of acquisition include:
- Documents related to the history of politically motivated repression in the USSR (1917–1991), including major family archives and collections (19th–21st centuries);
- The history of repressive institutions and the penitentiary system in the USSR;
- Documents of civic organizations and informal associations in Soviet Russia and the USSR;
- Materials on the history of political opposition, protest, and resistance in the USSR;
- Oral history and biographies of victims of political repression and members of resistance movements;
- The history of forced labor of Soviet citizens in Germany;
- Transitional justice (post-1991);
- The history of regional Memorial organizations and programs.
This targeted acquisition work has led to the creation of a large and diverse collection. Today, the archive contains hundreds of thousands of documents, terabytes of digital data, and dozens of databases and indexes.
Years of data collection and assistance in tracing the fates of the repressed have transformed the SIEC Memorial archive into a major consultation center. Until the liquidation of Memorial International in February 2022, the archive's staff handled an average of 800 requests annually, 70–90 of which came from researchers around the world. Extensive correspondence has resulted in a separate digital collection of scanned documents submitted by relatives following their own research.
In the 2010s, archive collections became the basis for numerous publication projects. Exhibitions such as Father’s Letters (2013) and The Right to Correspondence (2014) presented letters sent from prisons and places of exile. Materials and stories of former Ostarbeiters were featured in the exhibition Postscript (2019). Family collections formed the core of Bromberg’s Violin (2020), an exhibition on anti-Jewish campaigns in the USSR. The exhibition Material (2022) was the first to focus on women’s experiences in the GULAG, as told through handicrafts and letters from female prisoners. Although formally a continuation of the exhibitions, the books Father’s Letters (2014) and The Right to Correspondence (2015) contained many more archival documents and stories and were translated into several languages. The book The Mark Will Not Be Erased (2016), based on interviews and documents from former Ostarbeiters, received several Russian and international awards. The publication of peasant memoirs from the Memorial archive in All Sorrows Fell Upon My Heart (2019) was a notable event. The almanac Acta Samizdatica, published jointly by Memorial and the State Public Historical Library, became a vital platform for documents on the history of the dissident movement. Oral history collections also formed the basis of podcasts such as Ostarbeiters (2018) and Harbin (2022).
The liquidation of Memorial International (which had served as the legal custodian of the SIEC Memorial collection since 2011) in 2021–2022 and the confiscation of the building on Karetniy Ryad severely hindered the archive’s operations. Although the reception of visitors and materials continues at the Maly Karetniy Lane location in Moscow, the primary focus has now shifted to digitizing and publishing collections online.
As of 2023, the main online platforms for publishing archive materials include:
- Finding Aid to the SIEC Memorial Archive: A continually updated finding aid for archive holdings and a biographical name index;
- Ostarbeiter and POW Interview Archive: Published interviews with detailed historical commentary, name and geographic indexes;
- Fonds 21: Documents (photographs, official records, letters) brought from Germany by former Ostarbeiters;
- Lists of the Deported: Publication of lists of Soviet citizens who were deported to Germany during the war. Based on materials from the collection of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Committed by the Nazi Invaders and Their Accomplices and the Damage They Inflicted on Citizens, Collective Farms, Public Organizations, State Enterprises, and Institutions of the USSR (originals held in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, GARF), as well as on Memorial’s geocoded database on the history of forced labor;
- Dissidents: A list of individuals mentioned in the Chronicle of Current Events bulletin and documents from the archive’s collections on the history of dissent in the USSR.