ABSTRACT
Remembering, whether personal or political, has its own special social and historical context in each country. The relatively untroubled, unpolitical British confidence in the worth of the past thus contrasts with the overtly contested claims to political legitimacy of post-war Italians, the enforced silence of Spain under Franco, or the ambivalence or deliberate silence of the wartime generation in France or Germany. Yet the Soviet Union is perhaps the most remarkable case of all: a society, probably unique in the whole world, where remembering has been dangerous at least since the 1920s. The cumulative effect of fear of public remembering, together with the fact that so many families had members who were politically oppressed, and so had bitter memories, is very difficult for Western historians to understand. It is not just the political impact-although recording memories in Russia certainly has had and still carries political implications-but also the dramatic long-term effect on personal remembering. For both reasons there has been no easy social tradition on which to build oral history. With the beginning of glasnost in 1986, it became politically possible for the first time to start openly with oral history. Earlier, there had been some clandestine attempts to collect memories, some of which were bravely published in the West through subterranean networks, and there have also been recordings done with Russian emigres in the West. 1 But open recording and publishing in the Soviet Union itself has only now become possible.
