Memorial St Petersburg Funding Appeal

Tue Dec 21 16:07:35 UTC 2010

December 18, 2010

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

We are writing to you with our annual appeal for donations to MEMORIAL
in St. Petersburg, an organization dedicated, along with other Memorial
societies across the former Soviet Union, to bringing to public
awareness the many unknown victims of Soviet terror and to advancing
human rights in Russia today. At the bottom of this message, you will
find information on how to make tax-deductible donations in the U.S. and
Germany (see HOW TO DONATE).

During the year 2010, Memorial SPb engaged in a series of historical and
human rights projects. Work continues on its virtual gulag museum,
including an expanding data-base that draws on materials from over 100
museums across Russia.  A pilot version was launched in January, and a
partnership with museum professionals at Oxford University promises to
bring the virtual gulag museum to a wide international audience.
Memorial organized an international conference on "Forgotten Graves" for
those engaged in locating, cataloging, and memorializing the burial
sites of victims of repression, deportation, exile, and internment
(including POWs) between 1939 and 1950; it sponsored another
international conference on "The Right to a Name: Biographical Writing
in the 20th Century," with support from the Polish consulate in SPb and
the Franco-Russian Center for the Human and Social Sciences in Moscow.

Memorial SPb has now begun the project of creating scanned copies of its
archival holdings and integrating them into a shared electronic database
with its Memorial partners in Riazan' and Krasnoiarsk.  Even more
ambitiously, staff members of Memorial took part in an international
conference in Brussels designed to create a European-wide database of
archives whose materials include substantial collections of samizdat and
other "non-traditional" print-culture.  Part of the EU consortium
"Integrating Archives for Research on Contemporary European History,"
the samizdat database has the potential to transform research on late
socialist culture and politics.

Violence and repression, of course, continue to threaten human rights
activism and investigative reporting in Russia. The establishment in
2009 of a government commission to monitor "falsifications of history
damaging to Russia" continues to jeopardize Memorial's efforts to
discover the full extent of repressions during the Stalin era.  A recent
study by the International Federation of Journalists, Partial Justice:
An Investigation into the Deaths of Journalists in Russia, 1993-2009
documents the death and/or disappearance of 332 reporters during that
period.

Founded in 1990, the Petersburg Memorial society to this day exists as a
grass-roots organization, funded in part by various western foundations.
For years, several scholars (including those whose signatures you will
find below) have successfully mobilized support from friends and
colleagues, collecting donations small ($5), large ($1,000), and in
between. Donors are students, professors, and lovers of Russian culture
in the U.S. and Western Europe. These funds (which have zero overhead)
help cover expenses such as electricity bills, photocopying, computer
support, and tea for volunteers. Memorial SPb has always been, and
remains, financially strapped.  Today, Memorial SPb is still run by a
handful of people-with the help of numerous volunteers-out of an
apartment equipped with a unique archive, a small library, a seminar
room, a copying machine, and three computers.

Homepage: www.memorial-nic.org <http://www.memorial-nic.org>
<http://www.memorial-nic.org>
E-mail: gulagmuseum at gmail.com <mailto:gulagmuseum at gmail.com>
<mailto:gulagmuseum at gmail.com>
Postal address: NITs Memorial, Box 4, 191002,
St. Petersburg, Russia.
Tel.: [++7-812] 575-58-61, Tel. and Fax: 572-23-11.

We the undersigned know Memorial, its people, and its projects, and know
them well.  We appeal to you to assist Memorial with its important work.
Please feel free to forward this petition to friends and colleagues not
included in our mailing list.

HOW TO DONATE:

American donors should send checks, payable to the Chekhov Publishing
Corporation and - this is important! - indicating NITs Memorial SPb in
the memo section, to the following address:

Chekhov Publishing Corporation
c/o Mr. Edward Kline
1165 Park Avenue
Apt. 5D
New York, New York 10128

(See below for information on the Chekhov Publishing Corporation and
Edward Kline; there are no overhead costs.)

Please include a return address so that you can receive a written
receipt for tax deduction purposes.

Germans and other Europeans can wire money directly to NITs Memorial's
account at Memorial Deutschland:

Bank fur Sozialwirtschaft Berlin
Account #/Kontonummer: 33 200 00
Routing #/BLZ: 100 205 00
For/Stichwort: "NITs Memorial" (please be sure to mark that this is for
NITs)

We will repeat this appeal a year from now and try to ensure that NITs
Memorial has stable support from individuals in the West as long as
Russian funding remains unavailable.

Thank you for your support: it really does make a difference!

-------------------------------------
The Chekhov Publishing Corporation is a public non-profit educational
foundation and an I.R.S.-certified, tax-exempt 501 (c) 3 organization.
It was registered in New York State on July 26, 1968, as an
Educational-Literary Charitable Corporation whose purpose was to publish
and distribute or facilitate the distribution of works of literary,
historical and artistic worth in the Russian language; all of the
foregoing purposes to be accomplished without profit. While the Soviet
Union existed, the CPC published original works by authors who were
living in the Soviet Union, including Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky,
Nadezhda Mandelstam, and Lydia Chukovskaya, as well as the dissident
journal A Chronicle of Current Events. Since the fall of the Soviet
Union, the CPC no longer publishes books itself, but provides modest
financial assistance to non-profit publishers of academic and human
rights works in the Russian Federation. The CPC has no paid employees
and charges no fees for contributions received for transmittal to
organizations in Russia. Its president is Mr. Edward Kline, who is also
president of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation. Those interested in Mr.
Kline's bona fides can consult the preface to Volume One of Sakharov's
Memoirs.

Benjamin Nathans
Associate Professor
Department of History
University of Pennsylvania
bnathans at history.upenn.edu

Irina Paperno
Professor
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
University of California, Berkeley
ipaperno at socrates.berkeley.edu

Jan Plamper
Dilthey Fellow
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin
plamper at mpib-berlin.mpg.de

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