The Bremen Archive

In 1979, the émigré historian Michel Heller reviewed the series Pamiat́ (Memory), compiled by independent historians for circulation as samizdat (self-published, uncensored texts circulating from hand to hand within the USSR) in the Soviet Union; the series would eventually stretch to five issues appearing from 1976 to 1981. In his review, Heller cited an essay published in 1946, in which George Orwell had reported: “Among intelligent Communists there is an underground legend to the effect that although the Russian Government is obliged now to deal in lying propaganda, frame-up trials, and so forth, it is secretly recording the true facts and will publish them at some future time.”¹ With this remark, Orwell called out the delusions of communist intellectuals, and, in doing so, he highlighted the tension between a liberal belief in the objective facts of history and the totalitarian construction and enforcement of official historical narratives. For liberals and orthodox communists alike, the state remained the primary agent and true chronicler of history. The series Memory—arguably part of a loyal effort toward de-Stalinization, rather than an anti-Soviet initiative—demonstrated a loss of faith in the state’s ability to offer an honest reckoning on its own.

While documenting the state’s crimes, particularly under Stalin, was enormously important, the significance of Pamiat́ for historiography more generally had to do with its focus on regular people as the source of a more adequate record. The volume editors insisted: “Archives are not just produced by the state; they are also personal. Each person moving through life leaves a long paper trail: of letters, notes, documents. Each person remains in the memory of their friends, relatives and those people they simply happen to meet.”² The editors of Pamiat́ sourced historical material from Soviet citizens. As editors explained, the initial impulse for Pamiat́ was provided by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s work documenting the Gulag through the testimony of prisoners in the system. However, the collective working on Pamiat́ gradually moved toward a more pluralistic and less state-centered view than that reflected in Solzhenitsyn’s exposé of Stalin-era atrocities. As the editor Arsenii Roginskii put it: “having left the gulag behind, we needed to understand in what direction we were going. I think we moved away from … so to speak, crimes of power, of course it was there at the beginning and remained always, but we moved away from this quietly toward the history of the formation of the broad Russian public.”³ The evidence of public activity in the late Soviet period was also extensively covered by the well-known samizdat rights bulletin, the Khronika tekushchikh sobytii (Chronicle of Current Events), which documented the ongoing suppression of rights by Soviet officials as well as the existence of an increasingly broad range of independent civic and cultural activity in the USSR from 1968 to 1982 in over 60 issues.⁴

Editors of both series showed that people in Eastern Europe could make and record history independently of state control. This idea, which traveled to the West via smuggled texts and migrating people, also inspired the creation of the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen (Forschungsstelle Osteuropa an der Universität Bremen; FSO).⁵ Created in December 1981, the FSO did not reflect the same strategic and political goals guiding most Cold War research initiatives of the time. The FSO was a new type of research institute conceived by the Czech dissident Jiří Pelikán, who emigrated to Italy in 1969, following the suppression of the Prague Spring reform movement. In 1979, as a delegate for the Italian Socialist Party to the European Parliament, Pelikán became acquainted with former German chancellor Willy Brandt, then president of the Parliament. Prompted by developments including the growth of independent press and letters (samizdat) in the USSR and Eastern Bloc countries, as well as the founding of human rights organizations including Charta 77 in Czechoslovakia, Pelikán proposed the establishment of a research institute to collect the materials demonstrating a diverse and flourishing alternative public culture in these countries. The materials to be...