Memory slips and shifts depending on the person and the time. Ask any five people what happened at a particular place and time and they will all have a slightly – if not wildly – different memory of the event. Those are personal, individual memories.

Public memory, meaning the “official story” as remembered by a community, shifts just as much but it is often subject to the political powers and fashions of the day. Public memory finds shape in monuments, historical plaques, parades and legal holidays. The public memory of communities that are not in power takes shape in things like vigils, art installations, songs and graffiti.
Control over public memory is often a cause and site of contention. That’s true whether the question is access to archival documents that may or may not challenge the official story or bids for the design of a monument. Or even the subject of a monument.

The best example of the power of memory that I know of comes from the Soviet Union and an organization called Memorial. The rulers of the Soviet Union were masters of controlling public memory. They went so far as to erase individuals (their own former colleagues in power) from official photographs. They also lied about all sorts of things, not least of which was the death toll from the Second World War.

Memorial began as an illegal effort to list the names of the victims of Stalinism throughout the USSR. It was illegal because all non-governmental organizations were illegal in the USSR and because listing those names – both by discovering a number and by humanizing the victims by naming them – was a direct threat to the government.
So this rather tedious and not at all flashy activity of compiling lists was considered by the men in authority to be a dangerous attack on their own power. They were right. Gorbachev allowed Memorial to exist as part of Perestroika. It had huge popular support and it did indeed undermine the legitimacy of the Soviet Union.

It’s no surprise that Putin did away with Memorial.

Most of Memorial’s work involved the victims of Stalinism in the prisons and gulags but there were also unanswered questions about the Second World War. The Kremlin put great stock in being the government that won the Great Patriotic War, as they called it. They had huge parades and built huge statues to celebrate that victory. But they also lied about how many Soviet citizens died during the war. One of the reasons they could issue an official death count that was merely a fraction of the true total was that millions of Soviet citizens died far from their homes and did not receive individual burials. That’s understandable given the turmoil and crisis of the war, but it also turned out to be highly convenient for the postwar government.

It was also convenient for the Soviet government to let the bodies of soldiers who died in the forests around Stalingrad during the cataclysmic battle there rot where the men fell. In the 1980’s private citizens went into the forests to bury the remains. This was a slap in the face of the regime that bragged so much about winning the war but did nothing to honor the men who fought it. In terms of public memory, it was a victory for the little people.

I tell you this because next time I have a story about the memory of a French resister involved with Dutch-Paris.