Trans history in the USSR has been a blind spot for a very long time, having often been lost within the history of homosexuality or intersexuality. This way, trans memory stays in the same limbo that categorized trans lives in the eyes of the law, society and medicine. However, there are stories that we can tell from within this space of uncertainty and vulnerability.

March 21 is World Down Syndrome Day. Anna Margolis writes about the status of such people in the USSR.

The Ukrainian politics of memory and the Russian politics of amnesia

The history of Salekhard, Labytnangi and Kharp has long been inextricably linked to prisons and camps.

Today we publish a letter that came from one of our media subscribers. The author of this text has spent more than thirty years researching the fate of his grandfather - engineer Petr Petrovich Rempel, who died in the gulag camps in the 1940s. During this time, strange circumstances have come to light in the story - it is possible that Petr Petrovich was indeed involved in the underground work of resistance to Soviet power.

On the anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, we publish Aren Vanyan's essay on the Zeithain prisoners of war camp (1941-1945) and the family memories of the Soviet soldiers who died there. This text was written as part of the research for the Ehrenhain-Zeithain Memorial site.

We have talked to Estonians of several generations about the impact that the mass deportations of Estonians in the 1940s have had on the lives of their family and their country.

Human rights activist and one of Memorial's founders, Oleg Orlov was unjustly sentenced to 2,5 years of penal colony by a Russian court. We have prepared a historical account of the Pre-Trial Detention Center #2 in the city of Syzran where Oleg Orlov was awaiting his court of appeal. The history of this penitentiary, one of Russia's oldest, dates back about three centuries.

As Kharkiv is being fiercely shelled by the Russian army, a member of the Kharkiv Human Rights Defense Group, Iryna Skachko, describes the history of the “Word” (Slovo) House . This apartment building was built in Kharkiv in the 1920s to house Ukrainian writers, most of whom would later be executed or sent to camps, in a matter of years.

Soviet power carried out policies of forced Russification in Ukraine, as well as a number of repressive and murderous measures targeting ethnic and national groups, in particular during the Great Terror of the 1930s. Ukraine’s minorities - Jews, Poles, Greeks, Germans and others - were subjected to varying degrees of oppression. In the parlance of the Soviet police, campaigns targeting specific nationalities were known as “national operations”. We have translated the text of a presentation by Ukrainian researcher Roman Podkur that he gave in December 2023 at a conference organized by Memorial France and titled “Imperial Violence”.

2024 marks the 80th anniversary of the  deportation of the Crimean Tatars, a crime perpetrated by Stalin’s regime. This is indeed a mournful date, particularly dark because repressions against Crimean Tatars continue to this day, arguably as a direct follow up to the Soviet period. Activists call this a “hybrid deportation.”

Until May 2015 there had been a memorial plaque to the Ukrainian poet and human rights activist Vasyl Stus attached to the building of the Faculty of Philology of Donetsk National University, Universitetskaya Street, 24. Stus studied at the Ukrainian department of this faculty from 1954 to 1959.