Russia may dissolve the country’s premier human rights organization memorial to attack civil society and symbolically reverse the freedom won by dissidents during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Supreme Court case to be heard on Thursday may mark a watershed in Vladimir Putin’s campaign to reshape Soviet history by banning international monuments, which began to meet in the late 1980s to reveal Joseph Stalin and other Soviet leaders Human brutality and political repression.
The second case, which began on Tuesday, accused the Memorial Human Rights Center, another major branch of the organization, of “defending extremism,” and prosecutors considered this to be the reason for its dissolution.
Famous Russian activists and Western governments protested these cases. The Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe called these organizations “a symbol of the unremitting struggle for freedom, democracy, and human rights in the post-Soviet region and beyond.” Disbanding them will have a major negative impact on the entire civil society and the country’s human rights protection. “
Oleg Orlov, a member of the memorial committee, said that the government’s case under the controversial “foreign agent” law was groundless, but said that the final decision would be a political one. “In Russia today, anything is possible,” he said in an interview. “The public support we received and the noise surrounding this case gave us some hope.”
The memorial’s advocacy for human rights and political prisoners, such as imprisoned opposition leaders Alexei Navalny, Angered the government, Orlov said. But its research and education activities on crimes supported by the Soviet state face the same anger, not only focusing on the millions of victims in the Gulag camp, forced deportations, and violent purges, but also the executioners and officials who ordered the execution. Brutality.
“[The government] Be prepared to mourn the victims of the suppression, say their good words, remember them, but all these words about the victims of the suppression are almost like they are talking about the victims of an earthquake or flood. An accident,” said Orlov, a senior human rights advocate who joined the organization in 1988. “The government may be a criminal… This is unacceptable to them in principle. Russia is not yet ready to say these words. But we say them. “
Both branches of the memorial are early additions to the register of “foreign agents” in Russia. This is a punitive label that has been applied to many independent media and NGOs in the country. Prosecutors increasingly use the law as a stick to suppress independent voices.
However, the national network of memorials has survived the reactionary turn of Russia led by Putin in the past decade, and continues to promote its research on Soviet-era atrocities because it has established a database of more than 3 million victims of political repression.
As Russia further associates its national identity with the Soviet victory in World War II, and its conflicts with other post-Soviet and former communist countries and the West, this mission becomes more and more controversial rather than Confession statement.
Nikita Petrov, a historian and researcher at the memorial, said that in recent years, government archives have increasingly prevented researchers from entering because the original Soviet-era documents are again kept secret.
When Petrov joined the organization in 1988, he said: “We are enthusiasts. We want to learn more about history and tell people about their history. When Russia chose to take a democratic and legal path, I was in the darkest dream. I couldn’t imagine that everything would start to reverse eventually. Maybe I was too naive at the time.”
By the mid-1990s, the memorial had clashed with the government of Boris Yeltsin as the organization expanded to record state-funded crimes during the First Chechen War.Its continued activism poses a huge personal risk: Natalia Estemirova, a human rights activist and former board member of the memorial, was kidnapped in Chechnya And was murdered in 2009. Orlov Convicted of not guilty of defamation in 2011 The leader of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, was accused of personal involvement in her killing.
Its advocacy continues to anger the government. Its human rights center has been threatened for including Jehovah’s Witnesses, members of religious groups deemed extremist by the government, and its statistics have exceeded 400 political and religious prisoners. The list also includes Navalny.
Since the release of the list in August, the pressure on the organization has increased. In October, Masked man raid memorial headquarters During the screening process Movie Mr. Jones, Regarding Welsh journalist Gareth Jones and his report on the Great Famine, which killed millions of farmers in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era Ukraine In the 1930s.
Orlov said: “These are the last few places left in Moscow, where we can hold public public conversations,” he said that the organization may lose a place to store its archives, library and gulag. Handicraft Museum. “Of course, it will be very difficult for the Human Rights Center… Many people will not get help.”
Robert Latipov, the head of the memorial’s organization in the Perm region, said that the attack on the international memorial could threaten the nation’s “entire network of public organizations.”
He first joined the memorial in 1995 as a volunteer for Perm-36, a former Gulag labor camp that has now been turned into a museum. “When you meet real dissidents and prisoners of conscience who are being held there, and talk to them in real life, it completely changes your perspective,” he said.
Latipov said that local officials often support the mission of commemoration, including participating in the reading of the names of victims of the repression during the annual anniversary. But others undermined independent efforts to document Soviet repression, he said. In 2014, local militants seized control of Perm-36. The Gulag camp became a national museum with “no people, no hikes, no life”.
Then there is Latypov’s own experience-his home and office were raided by the FSB after an expedition to commemorate the monuments of people exiled to the area in Lithuania and Poland.
“There are some boundaries and some taboos that you can’t cross,” he said. “They are always moving. They are hidden. But as soon as you cross them, the state will notify you immediately.”
