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<\/p>\nThe Russian<\/p>\n
The Russian historian Arseny Roginsky, who has died aged 71, made it his mission to record and recover the names of the millions who had been imprisoned or executed under Joseph Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders. In 1988 he helped to found Memorial, one of the first independent human rights organisations allowed to be established after Mikhail Gorbachev<\/a> started to liberalise Soviet politics.<\/p>\n A soft-spoken scholar of great intellectual courage, Roginsky argued that remembering the past with empathy and accuracy was crucial to the construction of a civilised society. It was not enough to build monuments. Every persecuted individual\u2019s fate had to be discovered and made known.<\/p>\n The impetus for his life\u2019s work came partly from his own family history. Roginsky\u2019s father, Boris, an electrical engineer and Talmudic scholar from Leningrad, was twice arrested and sent to labour camps. On his first release he was confined to internal exile in the remote northern village of Velsk in the Archangel region, where his son Arseny was born.<\/p>\n Re-arrested, Boris Roginsky died in detention in 1951 but it was not until 1955, when Arseny was nine, that his mother was informed her husband was dead, allegedly of a heart attack. For four years she had continued to send him food parcels without being told it was a waste of time and resources.<\/p>\n Arseny studied at the University of Tartu in what was then the Soviet republic of Estonia. He graduated from the history and philology faculty in 1968, the year in which Soviet tanks and troops invaded Czechoslovakia to crush a movement trying to reform communism. It was a formative experience which also radicalised several intellectuals who later became Gorbachev\u2019s leading advisers. One of Roginsky\u2019s classmates was the poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya<\/a>, who was arrested for demonstrating in Red Square against the invasion.<\/p>\n Roginsky described himself later as a child of 1968. Less provocatively than Gorbanevskaya, but equally bravely, he moved to Leningrad and started interviewing survivors of the labour camps and creating an archive on the pattern of what the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn<\/a> was doing separately for his book The Gulag Archipelago. Roginsky\u2019s official jobs were as a bibliographer at Leningrad\u2019s main public library and a teacher of Russian language and literature in evening schools. In his spare time he founded an underground group called Memory (Pamyat), and from 1975 to 1981 edited its collections of historical works. They were circulated privately and illegally in what was known as samizdat (self-publishing), and from 1978 they were smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published abroad.<\/p>\n The KGB searched Roginsky\u2019s flat in February 1977 and again in March 1979. Although they found nothing, he was fired from the evening school where he taught. Two years later he was offered the choice of forced emigration or detention. He chose the latter and was sentenced to four years in camps for \u201cthe production and sale of forged documents\u201d, and \u201cfor transferring materials abroad to anti-Soviet publications\u201d.<\/p>\n On release he found himself swept up in the liberalisation of the media and the lifting of censorship \u2013 glasnost \u2013 ordered by Gorbachev. A longtime admirer of Russian radicals from the 19th and early 20th century, such as the People\u2019s Will movement and the largely rural Socialist Revolutionaries, Roginsky compiled a book in 1989 called Memories of Peasant Tolstoyans, the 1910s-1930s.<\/p>\n