"Knight") was established by public activists from the Moscow branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

Some notable Vityaz activists in Moscow were Ilya Glazunov and V. Kuznetsov (artists), S. Malyshev (historian), A. Lebedev and A. Lobzov (Colonels of the MVD), G. Frygin (Minaviaprom engineer), Vyacheslav and Yevgeny Popov (musicians), and K. Andreyev (locksmith).

Paul Klebnikov, in his book The Godfather of the Kremlin, Boris Berezovsky, or the Story of the Plundering of Russia, refers to Oleg Kalugin and writes that "the nationalist group Pamyat… was formed with the help of the KGB."

On May 6, 1987, Pamyat activists conducted an unregistered and illegal demonstration on Manezhnaya Square in Moscow in support of perestroika and to demand the end to the construction of an officially sanctioned memorial project at Poklonnaya Hill.

In August 1990, a permanent NPF council member, Aleksandr Barkashov (the author of The ABC of a Russian Nationalist), caused another split after he announced being "tired to be preoccupied by recollections".

On September 1, 2021, it became known about the death of Nikolai Skorodumov: according to a post by Vladimir Basmanov on the Vkontakte social network, Nikolai Skorodumov died on June 10, 2021, at the age of 70 in a Zelenograd hospital The recurring motive in the group's ideology was the claim of the existence of a so-called "Ziono-Masonic plot" against Russia as "the main source of the misfortunes of Russian people, disintegration of the economy, denationalization of Russian culture, alcoholism, ecological crisis" (according to Pamyat).

The Zionists were also blamed for the triggering of the revolutions in 1905 and 1917, the death of millions in the course of the Russian Civil War and for Joseph Stalin's personality cult.

In 1993, a District Court in Moscow formally ruled that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were a fake, and dismissed a libel suit by Pamyat.