Arseny Roginsky

Arseny Borisovich Roginsky (Russian: Арсе́ний Бори́сович Роги́нский; 30 March 1946 – 18 December 2017) was a Soviet dissident and Russian historian. He was one of the founders of the International Historical and Civil Rights Society Memorial, and its head since 1998.

Arseny Roginsky was born into a Jewish family in the town of Velsk (Arkhangelsk Region, Northwest Russia) to which, under Stalin, his father Boris had been exiled from Leningrad (today Saint Petersburg).

In 1968, he graduated from the History and Philology Faculty of the University of Tartu in Estonia, where he studied under the cultural historian Juri Lotman. (Roginsky's first publication was co-edited with the future dissident Gabriel Superfin.)

From 1968 to 1981, Roginsky lived in Leningrad and worked as a bibliographer at the Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library, then as a teacher of Russian language and literature in evening schools. Meanwhile he studied the twentieth-century history of Russia, particularly the 1920s and the history of the destruction of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and subsequent political repression in the Soviet Union.

From 1975 to 1981, Roginsky was editor of a samizdat series of historical documents and studies called Pamyat (Memory) [ru]. After 1978, it was also issued abroad. (In the early 1980s, by chance or deliberate choice, the name "Pamyat" was adopted by a far-right anti-Semitic grouping, openly active under Gorbachev. This forced Roginsky and others to adopt the title "Memorial" for the organisation to which he would devote the last 27 years of his life.)

On 4 February 1977, a search was conducted in Roginsky’s apartment. On 16 June 1977, he was warned to give up his "politically harmful" activities (in accordance with the unpublished 25 December 1972 decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet). After another search on 6 March 1979, he was fired from the school where he worked at the request of the KGB. To avoid charges of "parasitism", Arseny Roginsky was registered from 1979 to 1981 as a literary secretary to the writer Natalia Dolinina and Professor Jacob Lurie.

On 12 August 1981, Roginsky was arrested under Article 196 ("the forgery and the production and sale of forged documents") of the Russian Soviet Criminal Code, and accused of transferring materials abroad to "anti-Soviet publications" such as Pamyat. At the time, historians required a letter of request from 'authorised institution' before they could gain access to a Soviet archive. As Roginsky was not employed by such an institution, he was forced to forge his own letters. As his final statement in the court, he gave a speech about "The situation of a historian in the Soviet Union", in which he essentially admitted the forgery, justifying it by explaining the extreme restrictions under which Soviet historians had to work. This speech was subsequently published by the émigré newspaper Russkaya Mysl in Paris and the samizdat periodical A Chronicle of Current Events in Moscow, and in 1983 by the Journal of the Historical Association in the United Kingdom, with an introduction by British historian Geoffrey Hosking. Roginsky was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to four years imprisonment in a forced labour camp.

Roginsky served his sentence in full and was released in 1985. He was fully rehabilitated in 1992.