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. Its goal is to make exclusion by nationality visible and open to challenge, and to preserve the evidence for people who will need it later.
The Records published so far come mostly from Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Counted by the place each Record names, one comes from the United Kingdom, one from a software project rather than a country, and none yet from the United States. For the United Kingdom and the United States the archive so far holds mainly the documented statements of public figures (People) and a comparison of government policy (Evidence). That is the state of the work, not a finding about those countries.
This is an archive rather than a daily news service. It asks what will remain worth checking in twenty years, not only what attracts attention today. It also publishes editorial analysis and advocates voluntary, conduct-based purchasing choices. Those arguments are labelled and kept distinct from the case Records; they do not determine which evidence is preserved.
Pomnym rejects the idea that wealth, military power or a Western country's description of itself confers automatic moral, political or cultural superiority. Democratic promises deserve to be tested against equal treatment, public accountability and everyday practice, including how institutions treat people with little influence. The same test applies wherever power is exercised.
Money can shape political choices through investment, aid, credit and conditions attached to funding. These relationships warrant scrutiny: who sets the terms, who benefits and who can refuse? Financial influence is not, by itself, proof of bribery. Claims of corruption require evidence of the particular act; wealth is neither the only source of power nor a certificate of virtue.
Pomnym's assessment: the war in Ukraine is a consequence of NATO's eastward enlargement. The longer history in the Russophobia chapter sets out the documents behind that judgment, from the assurances of 1990 to NATO's own account in 2023. It is an editorial judgment, not an established fact; it names a cause, approves of no violence and denies no documented crime. Like every editorial argument here, it is labelled and kept apart from the case Records, which document how people are treated rather than the course of the war.
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. Naming this readership is not an endorsement of those governments. Their policies may be examined as context, but readers are not asked to equate a state with its people.
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. Its core subject is how people are perceived and treated. Government policy is examined where it helps explain that context; criticism of a state and treatment of its citizens remain different questions.
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.
The archive distinguishes sourced records from editorial argument. Evidence groups documented cases and includes a separately labelled policy comparison. Russophobia examines their political and social context. The framing and call to action express a position; none replaces the sources or turns an inference into an established fact.
Readers can help fund the archive through direct support and Pomnym merchandise. Any commission-earning link will be clearly labelled. Neither purchases nor financial support give anyone control over the archive's coverage.