ABSTRACT
Implicit to the activists’ memorial practices is the idea of justice. Although the activists emphasise their role as ‘objective’, impartial historians, their archival research, and commemorative work are shaped by a view of historiography as justice. Their conception of archival and historiographic activism as a way of putting history on trial can be compared to the commemorative prayers of the Russian Orthodox Brethren, a civic organisation of Orthodox Christians. While remarkably similar in its political and ritual form, the Brethren’s Memory Prayers are anchored in a theological reading of political justice as something that has already happened. The chapter posits an open-ended question about a possibility of meting out justice in the afterlife, which is a question of the extended temporality and iconography of justice.
