International | In Russia, haro on “foreign agents”

In this 30^e anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the news is symbolic. Last week, the Attorney General of the Russian Federation called for the “liquidation” of the NGO Memorial, dedicated to the defense of human rights and to the memory of the victims of the Soviet repressions.

Guillaume Sauvé
Researcher at the Center for International Studies and Research of the University of Montreal and lecturer at the Department of Political Science at UQAM

A few days earlier, the Moscow City Attorney General accused the same organization of justifying the activities of “extremist and terrorist groups”. The defendants denounce “a political decision” aimed at destroying the most respected organization of Russian civil society.

Founded in 1989 with the support of the famous physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, Memorial sought to take advantage of the democratization of the Soviet Union to uncover the truth about the repressions committed by the communist regime. Since then, the organization has brought together researchers and volunteers from all over Russia and abroad. Among his many projects, let us mention a monumental database accessible online, which allows the Russians to find the fate of a grandmother mysteriously disappeared one night in 1937 or of a grandfather sent to the camps on his return from the war. This list, constantly enriched, has to date more than 3 million entries.

New constraints

What can be faulted with such an organization in today’s Russia, where nostalgia for the Soviet era reigns, but where the condemnation of Stalinist repressions is the subject of a broad consensus, including in the Kremlin? ? In many ways, Memorial’s fate is indicative of the forms of restraint that the Russian state now places on NGOs and the media.

Contrary to what we observe in China, these constraints are not based on censorship and systematic persecution, but on public discredit and the instrumental use of justice.

The first fault of Memorial, from the point of view of the State, is to act as an “agent of the foreigner”. Under a law passed in 2012, any organization that conducts political activities and receives funding from outside Russia is required to register in the register of “foreign agents”.

Although the term is chosen to evoke espionage, it does not imply an automatic ban, but a set of administrative constraints. “Foreign agents” are exposed in particular to fines if they fail to declare themselves as such in each of their public speeches, including on social networks. Today Memorial is threatened with dissolution for this type of offense.

The scope of the “foreign agent” category turns out to be extremely elastic: these include human rights NGOs, but also NGOs dealing with education, health or charity. . Since 2017, an additional register has been created for media “foreign agents”, which primarily targets the Voice of America and Radio Freedom, but also independent Russian media like Meduza. The most recent innovation of the Ministry of Justice, announced this year, consists in extending the list to “natural persons”, that is to say to individuals.

Memorial’s second “mistake” is its efforts, since 2008, to count political prisoners in Russia. Most recently, the organization numbered 420, roughly the same number as in the last years of the Soviet Union. If the opponent Alexeï Navalny is certainly the most famous of them, most are imprisoned for religious reasons. They belong to groups that the Russian state considers “terrorist”, such as certain Islamist groups, or “extremists”, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses. By identifying them as such, Memorial is accused of defending and justifying their activities.

Why now ?

The motivation behind these measures is transparent: the Russian state intends to ensure its “sovereignty” against any foreign interference that would seek to destabilize it, as it sees the demonstration of in the uprisings that Ukraine and Belarus have known during the years. last years.

Their concrete application, however, leaves one wondering. Far from the Orwellian representation of an omniscient and omnipotent totalitarianism, the fight against extremism and “foreign agents” does not seem to obey any apparent logic, except the zeal and rivalries of the various institutions. police and judicial. Why, in fact, does Memorial see itself threatened with dissolution today, when the wrongs it has been accused of going back years? Why does the organization risk meeting the same fate as the Navalny Anti-Corruption Foundation, when Memorial does not take a position on the political scene? Why is Memorial concerned about its work to commemorate Soviet crimes when the newspaper Novaia gazeta, whose editor-in-chief has just received the Nobel Peace Prize, can openly criticize the current Russian regime? And above all, will Memorial be “liquidated” or not?

In 2015, as a reminder, the Supreme Court had already refused to dissolve the organization, reversing a request from the Ministry of Justice. This goes to show that Russian policy, at the very moment when it is becoming more and more restrictive, remains marked by the complexity of its internal struggles.

Closer to us

In addition to the register of “foreign agents”, most of whom are established in Russia, the Ministry of Justice has established a list of foreign organizations whose activity is considered “undesirable” in the territory of Russia. Russia. Most of them are American, like the Open Society Foundation of George Soros or the Church of Scientology. Only one is registered in Canada: the Ukrainian World Congress.

For further

Guillaume Sauvé offers these websites and books:

• The France Memorial website
• The website of the virtual Gulag museum, prepared by the St. Petersburg Memorial Center (in Russian, English and German)
• Françoise Daucé, A paradoxical oppression. Power and associations in Russia, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2013
• Irina Flige, Sandornokh. The black book of a place of memory, Paris, Belles Letters, 2021. Written by a contributor to Mémorial, the work traces the discovery of a Stalinist mass grave in Karelia.

Consult the site of Mémorial France Consult the site of the virtual Goulag museum