Pomnym (Russian: pomnim, "we remember") is a record kept while it happens. Since 2022 people have been refused bank accounts, turned away from universities, barred from competing and told to leave the countries they live in - not for anything they did, but for being Russian. It is documented, it is current, and the record is still growing: the newest entries here are from this year. Each one is dated, sourced to the original reporting, and set against the hundred years of relations between Russia and the West that produced it, so that whoever reads this later knows what was said and done, and how it felt at the time.
The evidence
Documented cases, official findings and the policies around them.
Why Pomnym
Pomnym means "we remember". The name is a warning as much as a promise. Much of what this archive records happened to people who had no reason to expect it - who had let their own history go, and so did not recognize the shape of it coming back. Remembering is not nostalgia and not grievance. It is the one thing that makes a repetition recognizable while there is still time to refuse it. That is what this archive is for: not to be read once, but to be there later, dated and checkable, when someone says it never happened.
Purpose
To preserve a checkable record and help prevent nationality-based exclusion from becoming ordinary.
The hundred-year context
Relations between Russia and the West have never stood still. Within a single century they have passed from the isolation that followed the revolution, through wartime alliance, the Cold War, detente, the opening of the 1990s and the partnership of the early 2000s, to the estrangement of the present day. Attitudes towards Russians as people have moved with them, and much of what ordinary people experienced at each turn was seldom written down at the time. Pomnym places the present on that hundred-year line and preserves it with the care that later readers will wish had been taken before.
Records
Each entry sets out a single case: what happened, when, where, and who reported it. Nothing is here on the strength of a rumor. Where an account is disputed, or a decision was later reversed, the entry says so - because a record that only kept the grievances it liked would be worth nothing. Read them together and the pattern is hard to miss.
- Lithuania brigade: serving in Germany, rejected for Lithuania
- Thirty years of German polls on Russia, and almost none about Russians
- Croatia refused visas to nine of Russia's gymnastics delegation, then issued four
- Assaults on Russian citizens in Germany peaked in 2014, federal figures show
- Sparkasse KoelnBonn restricted card and payment functions on about 2,000 accounts
Act
Choose on the basis of documented conduct, not nationality. This page sets out voluntary purchasing options and their limits.
Status
The archive is open and growing. Each entry is a documented case, dated and sourced to the original reporting, and the procedure for submitting material is being set up.