ABSTRACT
In 1990, on a visit to Veniamin Iofe, chairman of the Leningrad Memorial, I was shown several suitcases of index cards containing files on victims of the Soviet terror. These suitcases were stowed under the bed, in a private apartment, hidden and easily transportable. Likewise, in the Moscow apartment of Nikita Okhotin, thousands of index cards of personal fates of terror victims were being filled in, and hundreds of memoirs were being gathered and carefully, clandestinely stored. Memorial – an organization formed in 1987 to record, preserve, research, and disseminate materials on the Stalinist past – understood the politically proscribed nature of the information they had unearthed. So, too, did Jaap Kloosterman.
