Dissolution of the NGO Memorial in Russia: “The truth can never be annihilated”


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For the historian Nicolas Werth, specialist of the USSR and president of Memorial France, the decision of the Russian justice, Tuesday, to order the dissolution of the NGO will not prevent the work of memory on the victims of the gulag.

On Tuesday, Russian justice decided to dissolve the Memorial human rights association, initially founded by dissidents to shed light on the Stalinist purges, then on the repressions in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. For Nicolas Werth, president of the French branch of the NGO, former director of research at the CNRS and one of the greatest specialists of the Soviet regime, Memorial’s work of memory, initiated thirty years ago, “Has been made, is archived and can no longer disappear”.

Are you surprised by the decision of the Russian justice?

No, we are not surprised at all. Monday gave us a foretaste of what awaited us with the umpteenth increase in the sentence against Yuri Dmitriev [historien du goulag, collaborateur de Memorial en Carélie, ndlr], now sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. We already knew that this was an all-out, large-scale offensive by the Putin power. It’s about a…



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