Precarious Commons: Archiving Soviet Terror in Contemporary Russia

Using the example of Memorial, Russia’s oldest nongovernmental organization, this essay develops the concept of “precarious commons” to describe the continuous and uncertain process of creating an open-access digital resource and maintaining a community around it. In 2022, Memorial became one of the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize for its decades-long efforts to open official archives, to collect and solicit testimony from survivors and families of victims of Soviet terror, and to promote democratic values and human rights in public life. These activities illustrate precarious cultural commoning: ever threatened by bureaucratic enclosure, political and cultural amnesia, and outright persecution. The organization’s extragovernmental, mostly volunteer-driven work has established an open digital archive of state repressions as well as a vital space for educating a new generation of memory activists and imagining a different collective future.