The question is not who inherits, but who holds
When an organization is liquidated, the language of inheritance comes easily. Who inherits the archive? Who is the rightful successor? But inheritance presupposes a settled estate and a legitimate heir. In the case of Memorial—the network of historical and human rights organizations that documented Soviet repression and was liquidated in Russia in 2021–2022—neither condition holds. The more honest question is narrower and more uncomfortable: who physically holds the documents now, and under what conditions can anyone else see them?
The Perm criminal case offers an unusually concrete answer. In May 2023, the regional FSB directorate in Perm charged two former employees of Perm Memorial, Robert Latypov and Aleksandr Chernyshev, with “attempted smuggling of cultural property.” The allegation, as reported by Rights in Russia, was that they had tried to move some of Memorial’s archival documents out of Russia to Germany. Latypov, the former head of Perm Memorial, was outside Russia at the time; Chernyshev was detained. Eight other Perm residents were searched as witnesses.
This is not a story about a transfer of custody between institutions. It is a story about documents being collected, boxed, moved, seized, and charged. The custody question is being answered by coercion, and the answer, at least for the Perm papers, is the Russian state.
What the Perm archive actually was
The state’s framing matters. “Cultural property” is a legal category with specific consequences: it converts ordinary administrative papers into protected national valuables whose movement across borders can be criminalized. But Latypov’s own description of the Perm holdings is deflationary. “Like any organization, we had the usual flow of documents,” he told 59.RU, as translated by Rights in Russia. “There are many official documents: minutes of meetings, grant applications, projects, reports, orders. We don’t have any literary treasures.”
That description is worth taking seriously, not because it settles the legal question, but because it exposes a gap. A human rights organization’s routine records—meeting minutes, grant applications, project reports—are not usually treated as national cultural treasures. They become “cultural property” at the moment the state decides their movement is a threat. The classification is itself a custody claim: it asserts that these papers belong to a protected national domain and that their removal is a crime against the state, not a decision by the community that created them.
Whether the FSB’s characterization is legally correct is a question for a court. Whether it is historically accurate—whether these papers are the kind of thing a heritage regime should be protecting—is a different question, and one that the criminal framing forecloses.
The custody chain, as far as it can be traced
What happened to the Perm documents can be reconstructed in outline from Latypov’s account, though key links remain unverified.
Before liquidation, Perm Memorial underwent an inspection by the Ministry of Justice and submitted a full report of its documents. According to Latypov, officials had already seen and studied the organization’s official records. Then, in 2022, the Perm authorities removed Memorial from the official register of legal entities and liquidated it.
After liquidation, volunteers spent six months collecting and systematizing the organization’s official documentation. The result was several boxes of papers. Latypov says these were lying in Perm. On 10 March 2023, the plan was to send the documentation to colleagues in Moscow so they could make an initial assessment of which documents were worth preserving—which ones told the history of how Memorial worked as a social movement. The documents went to Moscow through a normal delivery company, according to Latypov.
Then, on 11, 12, and 13 March, searches were carried out at the homes of former Memorial staff. Latypov says all these documents were confiscated. “We still don’t know what’s happened to them, where they are now,” he said.
This is the custody chain as it currently stands: Ministry of Justice inspection, liquidation, volunteer collection, attempted internal transfer, seizure, unknown location. No public transfer agreement, no archival institution, no custody arrangement. The documents moved from an organization’s control to the state’s, and the state has not said where they are.
Two framings, one unresolved gap
The state’s account and Latypov’s account diverge sharply. The FSB alleged an attempt to smuggle cultural property to Germany. Latypov described an internal transfer to Moscow colleagues for appraisal. The sources retrieved for this article do not independently verify either account. What can be said is that the two framings are not merely different descriptions of the same act; they are different claims about what the documents are and who has the authority to decide their fate.
If the documents are cultural property, then their movement is a matter of national patrimony law, and the state is the proper custodian. If they are routine organizational records, then their movement is an administrative matter, and the community that created them has a plausible claim to decide what happens next. The criminal case does not resolve this disagreement; it forecloses it by treating one framing as legally authoritative.
For researchers, the practical consequence is that the Perm papers are currently inaccessible, and their location is unknown to the person best positioned to know. That is a custody outcome, even if it is not a custody decision.
Digital survival is not physical custody
There is a temptation to treat digitization as a solution to the custody problem. If the documents are copied, the argument goes, then it does not matter who holds the originals. The National Security Archive’s March 2022 briefing on the liquidation of Memorial makes a version of this point: “Memorial’s databases and publications live on,” it states, listing specific resources including the victims of political terror database, Stalin’s execution lists for 1937–1954, and records of repression victims executed in Moscow.
Memorial’s director, Elena Zhemkova, is quoted in the same briefing saying that much of what Memorial gathered is digitized and distributed widely and is part of the world’s heritage. That is a real and important form of survival. But it is not the same as custody of the physical archive.
Digitization creates copies, not successors. A database can be mirrored, cited, and preserved by researchers outside Russia while the paper records it was built from sit in a seized box in an undisclosed location. The digital copy answers the question “can the information be accessed?” It does not answer the question “who controls the original, and under what terms?” Those are different questions with different answers, and conflating them obscures the custody problem rather than resolving it.
The distinction matters for heritage practice. Safeguarding—the set of measures taken to protect intangible heritage and the communities that sustain it—depends on community control as much as on preservation. A digitized database preserved by a foreign archive may safeguard information, but it does not safeguard the relationship between the documents and the community that created them. That relationship is precisely what the Perm case puts in question.
What the Perm case does not tell us
The Perm case is specific. It concerns Perm Memorial’s own organizational records, not the Moscow archive of Memorial International, whose physical fate after liquidation is not documented in the sources retrieved here. It concerns a criminal charge whose outcome is not known. It concerns documents whose current location is unknown to the former head of the organization.
These limits are not reasons to ignore the case. They are reasons to be precise about what it shows. It shows that custody of Memorial’s papers is being determined through prosecution and seizure, not through a transparent archival-transfer process. It shows that the state’s classification of routine records as cultural property is itself a custody claim. And it shows that the question “who inherits?” is the wrong question, because no inheritance is taking place.
What this means for researchers
For anyone working on the history of Soviet repression or on the post-socialist memory landscape, the practical implication is that provenance and copy-location matter more than institutional succession claims. The relevant questions are not “which organization is Memorial’s legitimate heir?” but “which copies of which documents exist, where are they held, and under what terms can they be consulted?”
That means tracking the digital resources that the National Security Archive lists, noting their dates and coverage, and treating them as copies rather than as the archive itself. It means documenting the chain of custody for any physical materials that surface, including the circumstances of their collection and transfer. And it means recognizing that the absence of a document from public view is itself a custody outcome—one that should be recorded, not explained away.
The Perm case leaves the custody question open. The documents were seized; their location is unknown; the criminal case continues or has concluded without a public resolution in the sources available here. What remains is the record of what was collected, by whom, and what happened next. That record is itself a form of custody—the only kind that researchers can currently exercise.
Frequently asked questions
What was Memorial?
Memorial was a network of historical and human rights organizations that documented Soviet repression, operated a large database of victims, and engaged in human rights work. Memorial International was liquidated by order of the Russian Supreme Court in December 2021, and its appeal was rejected in February 2022. Memorial Deutschland describes itself as part of a network of independent NGOs in various European countries and the post-Soviet space, with research and education on mass political repressions in the USSR among its main goals.
What happened to the Perm Memorial documents?
According to Robert Latypov, former head of Perm Memorial, volunteers collected and systematized the organization’s official documentation after liquidation. The documents were sent to Moscow in March 2023 for assessment by colleagues. Searches at the homes of former Memorial staff followed, and Latypov says the documents were confiscated. Their current location is unknown to him. The FSB alleged an attempt to smuggle cultural property to Germany; Latypov described an internal transfer for appraisal. Neither account is independently verified in the sources retrieved here.
Are Memorial’s databases still available?
The National Security Archive’s March 2022 briefing states that Memorial’s databases and publications “live on” and lists specific resources, including the victims of political terror database and Stalin’s execution lists. Whether these resources remain accessible at any given time is a separate question; the briefing is a dated observation, not a guarantee of current availability.
Does digitization resolve the custody question?
No. Digitization creates copies, which can survive liquidation and remain accessible to researchers. But it does not determine who controls the physical originals or under what terms they can be consulted. The Perm case shows that physical custody can be seized even when digital copies exist elsewhere.
What should researchers do?
Document provenance and copy-location. Track which digital resources exist, what they cover, and when they were captured. Treat digital copies as copies, not as the archive itself. Record the circumstances of any physical materials that surface, including collection and transfer. And recognize that the absence of a document from public view is itself a custody outcome worth noting.