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Article snippet: Arseny Roginsky, a founder and the longtime head of the Memorial organization in Russia who died on Dec. 18, was no doubt familiar with the admonition of the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel that to forget a holocaust is to kill twice. Mr. Roginsky’s father died in prison, and Mr. Roginsky himself spent four years in three different Soviet labor camps in the 1980s for printing an underground journal whose goal was “to rescue from oblivion all those historical facts and names that are currently doomed to perish or disappear.” That remained his mission to his dying day, briefly with the support of the Russian state in the 1990s, then again in defiance of it as Russia under Vladimir Putin set about creating a narrative of Russian greatness in which historical facts could be a handicap. For Mr. Roginsky, historical memory meant more than compiling records; it also meant giving a name to the culprits — the interrogators, the guards, the state itself — and sounding the alarm at violations of human rights. In recent years, Memorial was targeted with searches, threats of closing and identification as a “foreign agent.” It is not only in Russia, of course, that reckoning with a nefarious past has been a struggle. Germany’s Nazi past, America’s Confederate monuments, Turkey’s refusal to recognize the Armenian genocide, China’s censoring talk about the Tiananmen massacre and many other examples bear witness to the difficulty of confronting a troubling history. The reasons are man... Link to the full article to read more