The Returning the Names campaign has been taking place on October 29 for 14 years. It began in Moscow at the Solovetsky Stone on Lubyanka, gradually spreading to different cities of Russia and the world. On this day, thousands of people gather in different cities around the world to commemorate and read aloud the names of the victims of the crimes of the Soviet state.
Throughout the years of the Returning the Names campaign, different people took part in it.
There are those for whom Soviet repression is, first of all, a personal tragedy, those for whom solidarity and joint civic action are important, giving them hope and strength, and those who feel that state crimes of the past and present are connected. The format of the action has remained the same as it was 14 years ago, while our lives are changing dramatically.
The tragedies that are unfolding in various post-Soviet countries before our very eyes are directly related to the fact that the modern Russian state has inherited the mechanisms of terror and persecution used in the USSR, and society has not yet learned to recognize and successfully resist them in time.
Here you can see what Returning the Names was like in the years prior: get acquainted with the photos and videos that became part of our broadcasts. Photos and videos for 2024 will also appear in this section after the event. The Returning the Names broadcast in 2024 can also be viewed on our YouTube channel.
Returning the Names: the Context
“Returning the Names: the Context” is a part of our broadcast that happens every year on October 29 on the Memorial YouTube channel. We talk about the Soviet repressions, explain the meaning of “Returning the Names” and unpack the myriad of additional meanings that comprise the action.
Human rights defender Sergey Davidis and historian Manuela Putz talk about how political prisoner lists are made, and whether those who don’t consider themselves political prisoners can still be added in. They discuss the history of modern Russia as a series of repressions, and, finally, resistance as an integral part of the image of the Soviet political prisoner.
Historians Tomas Sniegon and Maciej Wyrwa speak about the Soviet Terror in the socialist block and its memory today. Are Czechia and Poland victims of exported Soviet communism or accomplices in the repressions against their citizens? Why are people in Czechia and Poland skeptical of Western sympathies towards communism? Finally, what problems do modern democracies hold?
Roman Podkur and Elena Zhemkova talk about which repressed people are not rehabilitated in Russia, but are in Ukraine; who should be responsible for rehabilitation (the state vs. historians and human rights defenders?), and what it has to do with war crimes today.
Philologist Lyuba Yurgenson (Mémorial France) and historian Vladimir Berelovitch (Mémorial France) talk about the GULAG memory culture, its forms, and its connection to other memorial traditions — for instance, remembering the victims of the Holocaust. They explain the role the memory of GULAG played in French society in the 1970s and today, and why this memory is not contained within the borders of the former Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc but is part of the general European identity.
Yulia Landau (Buchenwald Memorial) and Irina Scherbakova (Memorial Moscow) sit in the Louis Fünberg memorial room in the Buchenwald archive and talk about the history of GULAG in the context of German memory. What are the specificities of remembering the Soviet in Germany, and how do they connect to memory in Russia? Which groups of Germans can we distinguish as those who have suffered under Soviet repressions over the years? How did they change in the context of the Second World War? Which connections between Russia and Germany can we find when researching and memorializing the history of Soviet repressions?
Alexandra Polivanova (Memorial Moscow) and Nikita Petrov (Memorial Moscow) talk about the lists and categories of victims in the context of the law on rehabilitation. Two layers of memory: the documental one (in the archives) and the symbolic one (at the cemetery). Who are the GPT database chekists? Why are they rehabilitated? Why are they in the database? Can we speak of individual responsibility when it comes to repressions and NKVD members?
Irina Fliege (Memorial Saint-Petersburg) and Dmitry Kozlov (Memorial Saint-Petersburg) talk about the Saint-Petersburg traditions of remembering the victims of political repressions. How do memory actions transform the books of memory with the victims’ names? How can the memory of resistance exist and what are the limitations of the law about rehabilitation?
Robert Latypov (Memorial Perm) and Elena Zhemkova (Memorial Moscow) talk about the early history of “Returning the Names”. What goals did the organizers have in 2007? How have they changed in 2022? Why are the lists of rehabilitated people still incomplete? How does Memorial approach the question of reading the names of non-rehabilitated victims or rehabilitated members of the NKVD?
Historians Roman Podkur (The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) and Emilia Kustova (Mémorial France) talk about how not working on the Soviet past in Russia made the events of 2022 possible. They speak about what happened after the publication of the open database of political repressions in Ukraine, how Ukrainians were prosecuted for speaking Ukrainian in the Soviet Union, and how the experience of violence and repression structures the national memory of different countries.
Video Gallery
The event organizers have tested the video and audio beforehand. Our donors helped monetarily so that we could rent equipment and pay for the work of our technical specialists. More than a hundred volunteers have worked on various tasks before and during the broadcast. Thank you to everyone!