ABSTRACT
Every fortnight, a few memory activists install memorial plaques on the facades of the buildings in Moscow where people were arrested during the Stalinist Terror in the 1930s–1950s. The plaques are flat stainless-steel rectangles inscribed with names of the dead and their scant biographical details, including the date of arrest and execution. To the left, the plaques contain a square cut that explicitly signifies the absence of a human life. The chapter describes an installation of a memorial plaque and explains how the memorial plaques constitute an iterative monument to the victims of political repressions in Moscow. Against the backdrop of the historico-ethnographic discussion of the origins of Memorial, the oldest independent archive of political atrocities in Russia, the chapter elucidates the perspective of The Last Address and Memorial activists on their commemorative labour that includes an understanding of names of the dead as facts, or pieces of historical evidence. Furthermore, the introduction explains how the activists contrast names of the dead to the numerical tally of the dead that dominates official historiography of the Stalinist atrocities. Finally, the book’s conceptual and methodological frameworks are outlined to suggest that monumental names can be re-thought as inscribed typographic images rather than identity markers. This move affords an understanding of movement of names into collective lists and how this process brings to the fore a broader philosophical question of relationality between singularity of one dead and the multitude of many dead that underpin historiographic accounts of mass atrocities.
