16 September 2026
Aleksei Babii, Krasnoyarsk civic activist, historian, and pioneer of the internet, died on 15 September 2026 aged 71
Source: Radio Svoboda
On the morning of 15 September, after a long illness, Aleksei Babii, a Krasnoyarsk civic activist, historian, and one of the pioneers of the local internet, passed away. He was 71 years old. For nearly forty years, he had collected information about people who endured Soviet repression, led the Krasnoyarsk chapter of Memorial, and created digital databases and books of memory. At the same time, Babii researched the history of the Krasnoyarsk Pillars, developed computer programmes, built websites, and wrote short stories and novellas.
‘I’m 70 years old, and I’m one of the youngest on the team. We’ve compiled a massive archive. It needs to be shared with the public,’ Aleksei Babii said two years ago in an interview with ‘7×7’. Back then, his days followed a nearly identical routine: before noon, he would sort through his email; then he would compile lists of those deprived of their civil rights; then spend several hours scanning archival files; and in the evening, he would sit down at his computer and upload the digitized documents to the website of Krasnoyarsk Memorial. Babii referred to himself as an ‘archive rat.’ At the time of his death there remained lists of approximately 150,000 people he had yet to process.
The last major interview he gave was published by Novaya gazeta on 15 September, before they knew of his death. After publication, the editorial staff added a few lines: Aleksei Babii had passed away. One of the most heart-wrenching stories in that conversation involved documents he found in the archives signed by peasants dispossessed as kulaks, who, before their deportation, had to decide which of their children to take with them and which to leave with relatives.
A Mathematician Who Became a Keeper of Memory
Aleksei Babii was born on 20 October, 1954, in Chita region. In 1976, he graduated from the Mathematics Department of Krasnoyarsk State University, worked at the KSU computing centre, taught, and later served as a senior research fellow at the Krasnoyarsk branch of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Software. In the 1990s, he headed the Demos, Krasfail, and Maxsoft, and later the Maxsoft web lab. He edited the magazine ON LINE, the online publication Stalker, and the regional section of Internet.ru. He authored eight books and several dozen publications—on information technology, the history of repression, and Krasnoyarsk—as well as short stories and novellas.
He became interested in the history of repression before he joined Memorial. In 1979, the 25-year-old Babii wanted to look at old bound volumes of Pravda. The library would not let him access issues prior to 1943. He then began investigating why his paternal grandfather, Fyodor Savyel’evich, had unexpectedly left Poltava region for Transbaikalia, and discovered that his grandfather had been ‘deprived of his civil rights.’
He then set out to find traces of his mother’s parents, as she had been orphaned at an early age. He was kicked out of the KGB archives. At the regional archives, he learned that his maternal grandparents had been shot in 1937.
‘I was a complete fool. I didn’t realize the danger,’ Babii recalled of his own researches during the late Soviet years.
His maternal grandfather, Nikolai Kliukin, was born in Tsitsikhar, Manchuria, into a family of railway workers. The family of his maternal grandmother, Tamara Girgilevich, moved from Ekaterinoslav to Harbin in 1911: her parents worked there at a Russian high school. After the conflict on the Chinese Eastern Railway, Tamara’s father, Grigory Girgilevich, returned to the USSR with her and two other children. Nikolai Kliukin and Tamara Girgilevich were later targeted in the NKVD’s ‘Harbin operation’ and were executed.
In 2017, Babii himself wrote about this family history in Novaya gazeta: ‘I owe my birth to that order.’
If his mother’s parents hadn’t been shot, he explained, her life would have turned out differently, and she probably would never have met his father. Tamara Girgilevich was pregnant at the time of the execution. Babii’s mother, Ideya, was six years old.
Babii himself, however, was never a dissident.
‘I was never a dissident; I didn’t even read samizdat during the Soviet era,’ he told Sibir.Realii in 2018.
It was only later that he learned that political and human rights activism was taking place not far from him at all. One of the people who introduced Aleksei Babii to this world was Vladimir Sirotinin. He had moved to Krasnoyarsk from Leningrad, where he had participated in the underground youth group ‘Kolokol,’ and in the 1980s in Krasnoyarsk, he was subjected to searches and interrogations for distributing samizdat, including Chronicle of Current Events. It later emerged that both Sirotinin and Babii’s university advisor, Valery Khvostenko, were members of the Fund for the Aid of Political Prisoners.
Khvostenko, with whom Babii became friends and whose home he frequently visited, deliberately did not give him any banned texts.
‘You don’t know how to lie; you’ll end up in jail immediately,’ Babii recalled his explanation.
In November 1987, Yury Shchekochikhin, Lev Ponomarev, and Yury Samodurov proposed collecting signatures to establish a memorial to the victims of political repression. In Krasnoyarsk, programmer Vladimir Birger took on this task. They met Babii at the Debut literary association.
‘It also turned out that he and I were colleagues—programmers. Volodya and I had access to computers, and it was easier to print the petition forms on them than on a typewriter,’ Babii recalled.
On 9 March 1988, Birger, Babii, and Irina Polushkina visited Vladimir Sirotinin at his home and asked him to lead a new organization dedicated to investigating the fates of those repressed. They named it People’s Fates. This happened nearly a year before the founding of the International Memorial. Later, the Krasnoyarsk organization also came to be known as Memorial. Babii headed Krasnoyarsk Memorial from 2002.
An apartment half-full of index cards
At first, there was no electronic database. Memorial staff met with relatives of the repressed, recorded their stories, and collected documents and photographs. When the lists began to be published in Krasnoyarsky komsomolets, letters flooded into the editorial office.
‘Volodya Birger was a master at this kind of research. If you look at his notes—in every interview, he manages to ‘extract’ up to 100 surnames,’ Babii explained.
Over the course of several years, the card index accumulated about 70,000 names. Roughly 40,000 index cards took up half of Vladimir Sirotinin’s apartment.
For the team, which included several programmers right from the start, the next step was a natural one.
‘It was clear that we needed to convert all of this into digital form,’ Babii said.
The Krasnoyarsk Memorial team created their first digital database back in 1989 using a Soviet-era personal computer: one floppy disk held the operating system, and another held the data. In 1998, the website went live. Babii said it was the first Russian internet resource on political repression.
‘We were the first among the Memorial members to create a website. And we started digitizing before anyone else,’ he told *Novaya Gazeta* in 2025.
When the national database of victims of repression was being created, Krasnoyarsk became one of the coordination centres, and Babii spent a month traveling through cities in Siberia and the Far East, helping to get the work underway locally.
‘You’d work in one city for a day, then fly or drive—and you’d already be in another. They were amazing business trips,’ he recalled.
By 2024, the Krasnoyarsk Memorial database contained about 300,000 people. Another 150,000 or so names were still being processed. Babii himself estimated the total number of repressed and exiled people who had passed through the Krasnoyarsk region at approximately one million. This is a research estimate, not an exact figure.
‘He was the eye of the storm’
Boris Belenkin, who headed the library at the Moscow branch of Memorial for many years, met Babii in the early 2000s.
‘I really liked him. What he said seemed genuine and well-founded. There was absolutely no pretence. If something interested him, if he set his mind to something, he wouldn’t let it go and would see it through to the end.’
At the same time, Belenkin and Babii argued for years—mostly in jest—about what to trust: paper or digital media.
‘I was his antagonist,’ Belenkin jokes. ‘He was an absolute advocate and fan of digital content. All documents, all papers, books—everything from paper to digital. To him, paper was a thing of the distant past. I told him: “Your internet won’t last—if a substation burns down, that’s it.” And paper doesn’t even always burn. Naturally, he made fun of my faith in paper.’
Oleg Zorin (name changed for security reasons), an independent researcher of the history of Soviet repression, began corresponding with Babii more than ten years ago. One of his great-grandfather’s brothers had been deported with his family to Krasnoyarsk region, and Babii helped Zorin search for information about him. Later, they began exchanging professional information.
‘He was—in a way—viciously optimistic. He had no illusions about some bright future; he understood perfectly well what was going on, and at the same time remained energetic. A very straightforward, honest, and calm person. I once wrote that he was the eye of the storm. Everything around him was spinning, but he was a point of stability.
Zorin recalls the massive effort involved in deciphering the lists of Germans deported to Krasnoyarsk region. Babii managed to organize a large number of volunteers who had to sort through enormous volumes of handwritten documents.
‘It was backbreaking work. Huge lists, handwritten texts—it takes a tremendous amount of time and effort. But he knew how to gather good people around him and get the job done.’
He remembers the phrase someone once used to describe Babii’s work: ‘a machine for bringing order to chaos.’
‘On one side, he has a mountain of unprocessed material; in the middle, a computer; and on the right, the processed material. And he slowly but surely works through it all.
‘He found my great-grandfather’
A resident of Kemerovo, Irina, wrote to Babii several years ago when she was trying to uncover the fate of her Circassian great-grandfather. All she knew was that he had once been exiled to Krasnoyarsk region, to some village.
‘I wasn’t really expecting anything. I wrote to Aleksei—the author and compiler of books and lists of the repressed. He promised to check his materials. A couple of days later, he replied: he’d found my great-grandfather in his lists.’
It turned out that the story the family knew was incomplete.
– It turns out my great-grandfather was a victim of dekulakisation twice, and only then was he shot. In other words, my whole life I’d only known about his exile to Siberia, but it turned out his story ended quite differently.
What surprised Irina most was that a man who worked with hundreds of thousands of names had even found the time to address her request.
‘There are clearly not just ten of us, or even a hundred. After all, Aleksei isn’t just an archivist who simply issues certificates. He’s done a tremendous amount of research himself, written books, and collected and organized information. And yet he still found the time to look into my specific case. What’s more, he even apologized that there wasn’t much information, because he hadn’t yet studied in detail the district where my great-grandfather was sent.’
She says that was when she realized what Babii’s massive lists meant to him.
‘Here’s a man engaged in historical research involving thousands of lives, yet he doesn’t lose sight of the individual behind those thousands—my great-grandfather, whom I’d been searching for over decades.’
Babii himself said he loved responding to such letters: they constantly brought new information. Sometimes he managed to find people who were unaware of each other’s existence, introduce relatives to one another—and from there, they continued to piece together their family history together.
Interrogation
For Babii, public projects were another way to restore a human dimension to archival documents.
Cultural worker Mikhail Ozerov (name changed for security reasons) participated in the preparation of a museum project in Krasnoyarsk about ten years ago. For one of the art exhibitions, dedicated to interrogations, the organizers needed someone who knew how the Soviet repressive apparatus worked.
‘At the very first meeting, Aleksei agreed, without any conditions, to advise us for as long as necessary.’ He very generously shared details about how the procedures of the Cheka, NKVD, MGB, and KGB were organized.
Together with director Andrius Daryala, they created the immersive documentary exhibition, ‘Interrogation.’ It was based on real investigative documents from the ‘Harbin case,’ including the interrogation transcripts of Babii’s own grandparents.
One audience member voluntarily entered a dark booth. Excerpts from the transcript appeared before him, and Daryala read aloud the investigator’s questions. The rest of the audience watched what was happening on a monitor.
‘Aleksei explained to us that many transcripts seem to consist of two parts. First comes a list of questions about biographical information. And then people suddenly begin to confess to the crimes they’ve been accused of. Between the first and second interrogations in a case, there might be medical reports documenting injuries and fractures. These texts were literally written in blood.’
After each session, Babii would come out to the audience and explain the documentary basis of the performance.
Ozerov recalls that Babii was by no means merely a desk-based researcher.
‘Despite his archival and systematic line of work, he always actively engaged in debate with those who tried to whitewash Stalinism or portray the regime’s victims as ‘enemies of the people.’ He could do so harshly and emotionally.’
Babii later helped Ozerov himself obtain his great-grandfather’s archival file.
‘He described all the nuances of dealing with the authorities; we prepared the application very well, and I was able to get everything. As far as I know, he provided such advice selflessly to a great many people.’
Books of Memory on the table
Probably, Babii’s most famous public debate took place in the mid-2000s on Krasnoyarsk television. It was a discussion about the erection of a monument to Stalin. Babii came into the studio with a thick leather briefcase stuffed with volumes of the regional Book of Memory.
Belenkin says that this scene, more than any number of descriptions, best explains what kind of person Babii was.
‘His opponent started saying something, and Aleksei simply, methodically, and slowly opened his briefcase and began taking out the books of memory one by one. He opened the first, the second, the third, and showed the photographs. Words were no longer needed. It was a powerful display of facts and thoroughness.’
Babii himself explained that there was also a bit of tactical cunning involved: his opponent was reading prepared remarks from a sheet of paper, and the books of memory gradually blocked his opponent’s view of the paper.
‘These are lists; each book contains five to six thousand people,’ Babii said in the studio.
He then opened one of the volumes to photographs of the dekulakised peasants.
‘Look in their eyes.’
Belenkin says that this is the episode he recalls every time he’s asked about Babii.
‘This is more important than it seems. That was the kind of thing he did, that was his character. I don’t want to invent some kind of separate, intimate story. But this one—this was real.
At some point, hope ended.
In the late 1980s, Babii, like many members of Memorial, believed that opening the archives and publishing documents would change society. Later, that conviction faded.
Belenkin recalls that for many Memorial members, the turning point came around the mid-2000s.
‘At first, the goal was to open people’s eyes, to enlighten our contemporaries. The Soviet regime had collapsed; they knew nothing—they hadn’t even read Gulag Archipelago. We had to educate people. But then what happened in the 2000s happened, and a feeling arose: “Oh, did we waste all that effort for nothing?” The work continued, but the motivations had changed.’
Babii himself dated his disillusionment to the early 2000s. In his youth, as he told Novaya gazeta, he believed computers and the free flow of information were, in and of themselves, capable of making society less vulnerable to authoritarianism.
‘I even put it this way once: a society with many computers is impervious to totalitarianism.’
Later, he called these ideas foolish.
‘I realized that wasn’t the case, probably by the early 2000s.’
By 2025, Babii was already saying that he didn’t expect to change the minds of people nostalgic for Stalin. The website, he explained, exists not for the sake of public education, but for the sake of the person who genuinely wants to work with the documents.
‘Maybe there will be just one such person, or two, but for their sake alone, it was worth creating this website.’
But his disappointment in his ability to change society did not turn into disappointment in the work itself.
‘We’ve compiled a massive archive. There needs to be public access,’ he said in 2024.
The archive from Prague
The chair of the Czech organization Gulag.cz, Štěpán Černoušek, met Babii in 2009. At the time, Černoušek was preparing for his first expedition to the remains of the camps along the so-called Death Road and wrote to Memorial in Krasnoyarsk.
‘Aleksei was actually the first person from Memorial I met. He met us in Krasnoyarsk, showed us what he had in his archive, and gave us materials, memoirs, and photographs. He also introduced us to a former guard on the Death Road. For me, that was a very important meeting.’
They kept in touch over the next seventeen years. Whenever Czech researchers needed information about repressed Czechoslovak citizens or people whose fates were connected to that country, Černoušek would write to Babii.
‘Whenever we needed any information or clarification, I always turned to Aleksei. And he was always more than happy to help.’
Once, the conversation turned to Babken Rashmadzhyan—a Prague architect of Armenian descent.
On 6 October 1945, Rashmadzhyan was riding a tram with his seven-year-old son, Zaven. Two men approached him, said something, and led him out of the tram. The father only had time to tell his son to tell his mother that he would return later.
Rashmadzhyan returned sixteen years later.
After being abducted by NKVD officers, he was sent to the USSR. He spent five years in the Gulag system in Pechora region, then was exiled to Eniseisk, where he worked at a local photo studio. Documents about his work in Eeniseisk are now available in Memorial’s digital archive.
When Gulag.cz was reconstructing this story, Babii traveled to Eeniseisk and found archival materials there about Rashmadzhyan.
‘Aleksei simply went to Eniseisk, found the materials there, and sent them to us,’ recalls Černoušek. ‘And now I don’t know who to turn to at all. We miss him terribly.’
Rashmadzhyan was rehabilitated in 1960. In the spring of 1961, he finally returned to his family. His son Zaven recalled how, during a break at the university, a classmate called him out into the hallway: there stood his mother and his father, whom he hadn’t seen since he was seven years old.
Beer and Solitude
Černoušek also saw a completely different side of Babii.
In 2015, he invited him to Prague for the conference ‘History Against Propaganda.’ Babii liked the Czech Republic, and after that he visited almost every year—sometimes just for pleasure.
‘He was a big beer lover. I once took him on a tour of nothing but small breweries. We tasted different varieties while talking about life, history, repression, Siberia, and the fates of Czechs. It was priceless.’
Despite all his public activities, Babii, according to Černoušek, preferred to work alone.
‘He admitted to me himself: what he loved most was being alone, reading, studying, and writing. He was someone who didn’t particularly like the spotlight. And yet he accomplished far more than many public figures.
Černoušek was particularly struck by the combination of two ways of thinking in Babii.
‘On the one hand, he was a humanities scholar—he was interested in people, history, and family memory. On the other hand, he was a mathematician and programmer with a very rigorous approach to information.’ He blended these two approaches perfectly. That’s a very rare occurrence.
The Pillars
Another aspect of Babii’s life was connected to the Krasnoyarsk Pillars—a natural area near Krasnoyarsk, famous for its syenite cliffs.
Not only did he visit the site himself, but for decades he collected information about the Pillars, old photographs, memoirs, and biographies. Babii was the originator of the idea and creator of the first ‘Krasnoyarsk Pillars’ website. On the site, he is referred to as an archivist with a collection of stories, folklore, and photographs about what came to be known as ‘Pillarism.’
When asked to explain in a few words what ‘Pillarism’ was, he replied:
‘If I had to express the essence of Pillarism in one word, it would be freedom. To put it more fully—admiring the scenery, climbing, and socializing,’ he told Sibir.Realii.
Over the course of a century and a half, around the Pillars there has arisen their own unwritten code. You must not damage living trees, harm animals, occupy someone else’s campsite, or enter a hut uninvited. But the most serious violation was considered to be failing to help someone on the rock face.
‘If you see that someone can’t get past a section—that they’ve overestimated their strength—help them,’ Babii explained.
His former academic advisor, Valery Khvostenko, recalls that after college, Babii worked as a programmer and then went into the private computer business: he launched computer literacy courses, which later became part of the company Maxsoft. It was there that he invited Khvostenko to teach in the mid-1990s.
At Maxsoft, he says, there was a Nonprofit Projects Lab: part of the money the company earned was invested in projects that benefited the public. Khvostenko, who was himself a fan of the Pillars, proposed creating a database about their history. To Babii, this didn’t seem like enough.
‘“A database and an app are too simple. Let’s build a website with an archive and an admin section”,’ Khvostenko recalls Babii saying. ‘Back when the internet was still in its infancy, that was a really cool idea.’
The project began in the late 1990s. Maxsoft allocated funds and staff; Khvostenko developed the database structure; and Babii became the chief ideologist and project leader. Gradually, enthusiasts about the Pillars began joining the effort, bringing old photographs, books, manuscripts, and memories.
‘The project took on the characteristics of a community-driven effort. In virtual space, we all worked together to build a sort of ‘Pillars super-log cabin’: some brought planks, others brought logs, and still others brought a cast-iron stove.’
The archive ended up containing thousands of photographs and drawings, old albums belonging to Pillar residents, books and manuscripts, stories, and videos of hiking routes. All materials were donated free of charge. ‘We don’t buy or sell anything. The project is nonprofit and humanitarian,’ – wrote Khvostenko.
In Babii’s work, the history of the Pillars constantly intersected with the history of repression. Babii collected information about repressed members of the Pillars and participated in the creation of the ‘Nelidovka’ exhibition. Its virtual version preserves archival and investigative files, photographs, and biographies of people from this community. For example, the story of Aleksandr Yavorsky—the reserve’s first director and one of the main chroniclers of the Pillars, who endured arrests and exile.
Even in recent years, Belenkin recalls, Babii still had ‘Napoleonic plans’ for the history of the Pillars.
‘He would talk a lot about the Pillars and show photographs. For him, the history of repression and the history of the culture of the Pillars sometimes merged completely.’
‘It will remain after us when we are gone’
In recent years, Babii—who had worked with computers his entire life—became an advocate of technological simplicity.
The Krasnoyarsk Memorial website was built almost entirely in ‘plain’ HTML. Babii deliberately chose not to migrate it to complex modern platforms. Over the course of his life, he encountered several instances where data created using what was once cutting-edge software became nearly unreadable after just a few years.
‘Everything new becomes obsolete very quickly,’ he used to say.
That’s why the website was designed so that it could be downloaded in its entirety and run on virtually any computer, even without an internet connection. Babii had specifically uploaded the current copy of the archive and knew that several people had already saved it on their own computers.
‘Take me, for example—I die, and then someone forgets to pay the hosting bill. And that’s it—the site is gone.’
If the original resource disappeared, he explained, anyone who still had a copy could repost it at a different address. Babii compared this setup to a Kalashnikov assault rifle: a simple system should work regardless of its environment.
By 2025, the archive contained about 18,000 pages.
‘In essence, we’ve created an encyclopedia of repression in Krasnoyarsk region. And that is the main result of our work.’
Belenkin last saw Babii in Prague in 2025.
‘The plan was to digitize, upload, and organize the electronic database—the entire collection. That was the main priority. People were constantly bringing him things, and he kept finding more.’
Babii’s death cut this work short. But for decades, he himself had been trying to organize the archive so that the death of a single person would not mean the disappearance of what had been collected.
All his life, Aleksei Babii worked to restore connections: between a paper file and a digital database, a name on a list and a photograph, a person who was executed and a great-grandson who, eighty years later, was trying to learn his fate; between the archive in Eniseisk and a family in the Czech Republic; between the repressed members of the Pillars community and those who, decades later, read their histories.
‘For me, this is a rare combination,’ says Irina from Kemerovo. ‘The scale of this enormous work and a completely human approach to an individual who simply turned up to ask about their own little family history.’
Shortly before his death, Babii spoke about the archive he had created:
‘It will remain after us when we are gone.’
And he did all he could to make sure that would be the case. He worked so that the preservation of memory did not depend on a single computer, a single server, or even on himself.
Translated by Rights in Russia
