About the project

The histories of millions of families in contemporary Europe are tied to the history of state terror in the Soviet Union. These days, it is necessary to collect information about people’s destinies piece by piece from dozens and even hundreds of sources: state archives in post-Soviet countries, family archives, books of memory, recollections, interviews, and even reports of archaeological expeditions. To navigate the sheer diversity of possibilities, one needs an experienced guide or – even better – a single mechanism that allows for processing information from multiple sources.

This idea was at the beginning of the project known as Memory of Repressions founded by the Czech association, GULAG.cz with the participation of representatives of the Memorial association. The idea is simple: set up a search site that will allow for handling all major databases and reference resources on political repressions compiled by Memorial and other memory projects at once. Such a project could also function as a guidebook to the available data and facilitate access to it.

The website you are visiting represents one step in that direction. This is where dozens of websites are integrated into a single system. Among them are well-known databases (such as base.memo.ru) as well as more specialised projects that do not necessarily catch the eyes of researchers immediately. As the project progresses, we will add new data sets and improve the interface and the search logic.

Of course, Memory of Repressions is just the beginning of the quest. In order to obtain more detailed information, we always recommend visiting data source sites. A lot of information has not been entered in databases and can be found only through your own diligent and focused search. Sometimes, this requires writing queries to archives and hoping to receive answers. With that said, right now, regardless of the restrictions on access to state archives, the Internet can tell you a lot. Our task is to help you take the initial steps.

The search system is only capable of searching and presenting results in the Russian language. This is because the databases are kept in Russian, and any automated translation of data into English can be rather inexact, especially when it comes to technical terminology.