What this is
Pomnym is a contemporary documentation project. It records how Russians are perceived and treated in the Western world - in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States in particular - while it is happening, so that the record exists later, dated and checkable, when someone says it did not.
It is not a news site and not a campaign. A news site decides what is worth reporting today; this decides what will be worth having in twenty years, which is a different question and usually a duller one. A campaign knows its conclusion before it reads. This is an archive that happens to be published as it accumulates, and the publishing is incidental - the record would be kept either way.
What we preserve
- Public statements by politicians, officials and institutions, quoted in full and in context.
- Media coverage and the way it frames Russians and Russia.
- Laws, sanctions and administrative practice as they reach individual people: visas, banking, employment, education, sport and culture.
- Everyday experience: what people report from work, school, neighbourhoods and public life.
- The mood of the moment: what was said and assumed as a matter of course, which a later reader would otherwise have no way to recover.
- Fairness and solidarity as well. The aim is an honest record, not a one-sided one.
How we work
- Every entry is dated, sourced and attributed. Primary sources are preserved next to our summary.
- Corrections are recorded openly, never applied silently.
- Everything is published in English, Russian and German, and each version is written to read naturally in its own language rather than translated word for word.
Who this is for
People of Russian descent, wherever they live - and often precisely not in Russia: in Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States and the West generally, which is where the treatment recorded here actually reaches them.
Readers whose account of events is dismissed before it is heard. That is not a complaint, it is the reason every entry carries its source. An archive written for a reader who is believed can afford to assert; this one cannot, and the discipline that follows is the whole of its method. An unsourced claim here would hand the dismissal its argument.
And readers who oppose globalism - who see in Russia, China and Iran the major powers standing between a single hegemon and a multipolar world, and who would rather live in the second. This archive takes no position on those governments and offers none of them any help. It says plainly that it is read by people who hold that view, because a reader is owed that before the first entry rather than after it.
Naming a reader does not license writing for one. Nothing here is softened because the audience would prefer it softened, and nothing is included because it flatters. Where a decision was reversed, an account disputed, or an official body found no wrong, the entry says so - a record that kept only what its readers wanted would be worth nothing at the moment it is needed.
What it is for later
Records are not kept for the people who write them. Most of what is here is already known to the people it happened to, and they need no archive to tell them. It is kept for the reader who arrives afterwards - a lawyer, a historian, a grandchild, someone assembling what the period was actually like - who will find that the contemporaneous account either exists or does not.
Most of the twentieth century's ordinary experience was never written down while it happened, and what was recovered later was recovered from whatever survived by accident. This is the attempt not to leave the present to that.
The outcome this archive wants is the one that makes it unnecessary: that treating a person according to a passport stops being ordinary, and the entries stop arriving. Until then it grows. If it ever stops growing for the right reason it stays online regardless, because the point was never the size of it.
What this is not
It is not a defence of the Russian government. That government is not this site's subject and gets no help here, and the distinction matters more than usual: treating a state and the people under it as one thing is the exact error the rest of this archive documents.
It is not a claim about what whole peoples feel. Nothing researched here supports such a claim and the archive does not make one. What it records is narrower and better supported - specific institutions, taking specific decisions, about specific people.
It is not a legal finding. Where an official body examined a practice and found against it, the entry says so and names the body. Where one examined a practice and found no prohibited distinction, the entry says that too.
It asserts nothing on its own authority except on one page, which announces itself. The evidence page groups what the entries already carry; the narrative page argues, and says at the top that it is arguing.
It carries no advertising, no sponsorship and no institutional money, and it never will. An archive that depends on somebody's goodwill can be closed by withdrawing it.