ABSTRACT
Compared with its Eastern European satellites, the former Soviet Union had a surprisingly early start at transitional justice. As early as 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy glasnost (openness) “shattered the hitherto unchallenged certainties of the past”1 and helped to “remove the blank spots of history”2 by allowing Soviet citizens to call for a reevaluation of the darkest moments of the communist past before citizens in Eastern Europe could even hope to do so. In its quest for transparency and legitimacy, some of the new party leaders distanced themselves from their predecessors by encouraging the public to denounce the abuses of past Soviet regimes. An important grassroots organization set up in 1987 was Memorial, concerned with history and political symbols, engaged in discovering and revealing the truth, and dedicated to preserving the memory of the victims of successive waves of Soviet repression. With over 120 regional chapters in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states, Memorial prepared Books of Memory including the names and biographies of victims in different regions. In total, the books present fewer than one million of the four million victims of the Great Terror, but they represent a powerful tool in keeping the memory of those sacrificed alive for future generations.3 By 1991, when the Soviet Union disintegrated and the communist regime officially collapsed, citizens in those countries had become increasingly aware of Stalin’s reign of terror and increasingly willing to openly recount their own harrowing personal accounts of life under the hammer and sickle.4
