“Memory of Repression”: A new project to search for data on Soviet terror

Thanks to the long-term work of many branches of the Memorial Association and other organizations, there are already a number of extensive databases on the victims of political repression in the USSR and the places associated with them. These sub-databases are gradually released and expanded through various projects, many of which have not yet been interconnected. The purpose of the new umbrella search engine Memsearch.org is then to provide users with the ability to search all these databases simultaneously and in one place, which greatly facilitates access to information.

This project is also a continuation of the pilot version of the search engine, which was launched even before the liquidation of Memorial's umbrella organizations in Russia in 2021. The development continued despite the difficult conditions in which Memorial's collaborators in Russia and abroad find themselves due to Russian aggression against Ukraine and increasing repression .

The stories of millions of families in Europe are linked to the history of state terror in the Soviet Union. In order to create a comprehensive picture of the extent of repression and the fate of individual victims, it is necessary to find information from tens or even hundreds of sources. These are state archives of post-Soviet countries, family heirlooms, memorial books, memoirs, interviews or even reports on archaeological expeditions. To navigate this diversity, an experienced guide is needed, or better yet, a mechanism that allows gathering and providing information from many sources at once.

This idea became the starting point for the realization of the project. The main goal was to create a searchable website that would allow all major databases and reference sources on political repression created by the Memorial and other memory institutions to be processed at once.

Search system Memsearch.org combines data from dozens of sites and databases and allows searching for biographical information, burial information, archival documents, reference data about the NKVD system and Gulag, as well as museum objects related to the history of Soviet state terror and resistance to the regime.

In the future, we plan to further develop the search system and expand it with other information sources.

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Overview of linked databases within the Memsearch.org search engine:

1) Memorial in Moscow
- Database of victims of political terror in the USSR, including more than 3 million records: https://base.memo.ru
- Stalin's execution lists: https://stalin.memo.ru
- Database of places associated with repression in Moscow: https://topos.memo.ru
- Database on the administration of forced labor camps in the USSR - Gulag: http://old.memo.ru/history/nkvd/gulag/maps/ussri.htm
- Catalog of memoirs: https://memoirs.memo.ru/
- Memorial Museum: https://museum.memo.ru/
- Personnel composition of NKVD workers: https://nkvd.memo.ru/

2) Iofe Fund (St. Petersburg)
- Necropolis of Terror and Gulag: https://mapofmemory.org
- Database of the memorial complex in Sandarmoch: https://sand.mapofmemory.org
- Database of the memorial complex in Krasny Bor: https://kb.mapofmemory.org/
- Electronic archive of the Iofe Fond: https://arch2.iofe.center/
- Database of monuments at the Levashovo cemetery: https://lev.mapofmemory.org

3) Gulag.cz (Czech Republic)
- Virtual museum of the Gulag – a project that contains selected information about persecuted Czechs, Slovaks and other nationalities and places associated with Soviet repression: https://gulag.online/en

4) Memorial Perm
- Book of memory of victims of political repression in the Perm region: http://kniga.pmem.ru/
- Map of Terror and Gulag in the Kama River Region: http://www.pmem.ru/index.php?id=32

5) Perm-36 Memorial Center
- Database of political prisoners in Permian camps in the 1970s-1990s. years: https://www.gulag-perm36.org

6) Memorial Krasnoyarsk
- Krasnoyarsk memorial database: https://memorial.krsk.ru

7) Ryazan Martyrologist
- Ryazan Memory Project Database: https://stopgulag.org