[4][5] Arseny Roginsky was born into a Jewish family[6] in the town of Velsk (Arkhangelsk Region, Northwest Russia) to which, under Stalin, his father Boris had been exiled from Leningrad (today Saint Petersburg).

On 12 August 1981, Roginsky was arrested under Article 196 ("the forgery and the production and sale of forged documents") of the RSFSR Criminal Code, and accused of transferring materials abroad to "anti-Soviet publications" such as Pamyat.

[11] As his final statement in the court, he gave a speech about "The situation of a historian in the Soviet Union" (published by the émigré newspaper Russkaya Mysl in Paris and the samizdat periodical A Chronicle of Current Events in Moscow).

[13] In 1988–1989, Roginsky was one of the founders of Memorial, the "Historical and Educational, Human Rights and Humanitarian Society" (to give its full title), which became a national movement during the perestroika years[14] and spread across Russia and into parts of the former Soviet Union.

[16] His skills as a historian were applied in the research that lay behind the Books of Remembrance (see below) issued by Memorial between 1995 and 2005 for places in and around Moscow where victims of political repression were buried and, latterly, executed as well: Donskoi Monastery,[17] the Butovo firing range[18] and Kommunarka.

In 2012, addressing a round-table discussion in Dnipropetrovsk (Ukraine), Arseny Roginsky touched on the diplomatic aspect of his work as a historian and leading figure in the Memorial Society.

[20] By 1994, as he told participants at the discussion of "The Historian between Reality and Memory" in Dnipropetrovsk, Roginsky had assembled and studied a vast number of reports from all over the country, about political terror in the USSR and arrests by the Soviet security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD and KGB).

When he looked at his figures, he was concerned about their impact on people whose opinion he respected – members of the traditional intelligentsia and former prisoners of the Gulag who then still survived in large numbers.

But not yet.” The names of those arrested and shot or imprisoned by the Soviet security services would form the basis of numerous regional Books of Remembrance published in the 1990s and 2000s and, ultimately, of Memorial's own online database of "The Victims of Political Terror in the USSR"[21] of which Roginsky was director of research.