The NGO Memorial is attacked via its subsidiaries or entities, the Human Rights Center on the one hand, which acts on Russian soil, and Memorial International on the other hand, which, as its name suggests, works abroad, especially in France, Belgium and Germany. The Russian prosecution accuses him of not respecting the catch-all law on “foreign agents”. This law stipulates that any organization benefiting from international funding must include in its publications “foreign agent”.
Memorial has already paid a fine of 75,000 euros for this reason, and disputes the facts. But during the hearing scheduled for Thursday, November 25, the Russian justice intends to ask for its dissolution, the prosecutor even uses the word “liquidation” for “apology for terrorist activities”. The bottom line is above all that the government does not support the support given by Memorial to all political prisoners. She counted more than 400, a record for 30 years and the end of the Soviet Union. She notably criticized the imprisonment of the most famous of these opponents, Alexei Navalny. This trial is therefore fully in line with Vladimir Putin’s strategy of silencing any dissenting voice, political leaders, journalists, and now NGOs.
This is one more step taken because Memorial is an emblematic NGO. She is known all over the world for her defense of human rights and opponents in today’s Russia. And even more for his exemplary memory work on the Soviet period and in particular on the victims of the gulag. Memorial was founded in 1989, at the time of perestroika, the last phase of the USSR. Founded by the famous Nobel Peace Prize winner Andreï Sakharov. And since then, she has notably drawn up the list of 3.5 million victims of Soviet repression, since Stalin. She found their traces, investigated their conditions of detention in the camps, returned their story to tens of thousands of families. A colossal job. It is this first of all, this memory, that the Russian power is attacking today.
Moscow wants to erase this memory. It is for this reason that this offensive against Memorial takes a new step in repression. It’s not just about repressing the present, it’s about denying and revisiting the past. What disturbs the Russian authorities is this work of memory. Vladimir Poutine is engaged in a work of rewriting history which aims to impose a great patriotic narrative in which no task appears. This is incompatible with the recognition and clinical examination of Stalinist terror.
Denying this past is the best way to deny that it can happen again. So there really is a specific political strategy behind this attack on Memorial. Note that in France, a petition has been circulating for a few days to defend the NGO. It has already been signed by many intellectuals and researchers, such as Thomas Piketty, Stéphane Audoin Rouzeau, Pap Ndiaye, Marc Lazar, Dominique Schnapper, etc.