The present article reconstructs the events surrounding the creation of Memorial, highlighting Michail Gorbachev’s role in both launching the politics of memory of the victims of Soviet repressions and trying to manage the tensions which arose within the Cpsu in relation to Memorial. It does so by comparing firsthand accounts, archival sources and secondary literature. The rise of Memorial as a spontaneous, bottom-up movement spread across the Soviet Union, while “unleashed” by Gorbachev’s reform, led to a series of crises within the highest echelons of Soviet power between moderate and conservative fractions of the party, notably the KGB, which saw the new movement as partially “extremist”. Through the analysis of a variety of sources, the article highlights an episode which sheds light on some of the dynamics at play between the Cpsu and a changing society during the Gorbachev era.
