The experience of compiling the deported people Memorial Books: issues and decisions

The paper is devoted to the problem of database creation and to the preparation of Memorial Books on deported people. Principles of creation of public information resources, methods of selection and processing of mass personal sources for this category of repressed people are presented in this article. Six million people were engaged in the system of special settlements, that is about one million people more than those who were prosecuted on the political motives. In the three-million database called "Victims of Political Terror in the USSR" created by the Memorial Society and integrating all ethnic and regional Memorial Books and martyrologies published or prepared in post-soviet countries, only one third of notes deals with deported people. State projects focused on the preservation of memory about victims of political terror are being implemented in all post-soviet countries. However, there are some limits on processing of personal data. In Russia these limits are extended to all files of repressed people, which substantially complicated activities of both specialists of the respective departments and historians on the implementation of the state programme. By now, the requirements referring to data bases containing information about repressed people, which are to be published as Memorial Books are standardised. According to the national laws such publications should perform information functions and contain personal information on the history of repressions open and accessible to a wider circle of interested people. The analysis of Memorial Books on exiled people showed that there was a limited number of such publications and they were only devoted to peasants and their family members deported in the beginning of the 1930s. There is even a smaller number of ethnicity-based publications (devoted to Germans, Poles, etc.). These publications allowed to conclude that rehabilitation is finished neither as the official, state task, nor in the context of social resonance and preservation of historical memory about political repressions. Preliminary results of the Russian-Armenian team work engaged in compiling martyrology of 16 000 ethnic Armenians deported to the Altai and Narym regions as "dashnaks" and "citizens of Turkey" during the deportation of 14 June 1949 are addressed. The integrated data base on the prosecuted Armenians contains information on 30 parameters and addresses the data on the national and social status of the deported, their family status, their residence before deportation and in exile, and also on their liberation and rehabilitation. Possibilities of creation of the integration data bases based on files of deportation of families that are kept in the National Archive of Armenia corrected with statistical data from the Information Centre of the Ministry of the Internal Affairs from Altai Krai are demonstrated in the paper.

Keywords

Authors

References