ABSTRACT
Starting with a fine-grained ethnographic account of an opening of a monument on the site of mass burials at Kommunarka, the chapter explores the activists’ distinction between remembering everyone and all the dead of the Stalinist Terror. The conceptual link between everyone and all brings to light the tensions between the memory activists and the descendants of the killed who protest the inclusion of names of perpetrators on the monument to the victims of the Stalinist killings. The chapter elucidates the profound implications of the activist’ commitment to collect all names of the dead, one by one. In particular, this simple formulation is underpinned by a provocative understanding of the value of one, or singularity, as equivalent to all, or multitude, of the dead. The chapter includes a historical example of how the logic of addition and subsumption of names into a list worked in reverse during the politically motivated repressions of an informal sociological and philosophical circle. The chapter suggests that the quasi-mathematical operations of addition, subsumption, erasure, and subtraction inform articulations of history of a violent past.
