The shock wave spread across the country and beyond its borders, when on Tuesday, December 28, the Russian Supreme Court ruled the dissolution of Memorial International, the oldest Russian non-governmental organization and best known for her research on Soviet-era repressions. The verdict was delivered within minutes by Judge Alla Nazarova, who clarified “Accede to the request of the prosecution”.
Before the Court, the prosecutor Alexeï Jafiarov did not give the organization any chance: “It is obvious that Memorial, speculating on the theme of repressions in the XXe century, creates a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state ”, had he just concluded by accusing him, moreover, of “Launder and rehabilitate Nazi criminals”. Outside, anonymous people who came to support the organization continued to hold up signs. “We will never die”.
For many Russians seeking information on the past fate of their relatives, the NGO played a leading role in documenting the Stalinist terror to which the families were victims. It continues to do so even today, while these crimes are relativized or put under the carpet. Its disappearance is telling in this sense: the current Russian power, whose representatives proudly claim the legacy of the Soviet security services, is getting rid of the last organization openly criticizing this legacy and pointing out the similarities between past and present practices.
Thirty years just after the disappearance of the USSR, endorsed on December 25, 1991, the decision of the Russian justice thus signals the extent of the backtracking. The foundation of Memorial, in 1989, by dissidents, including the Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, was, in addition to being an achievement of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, the symbol of a post-Soviet Russia determined to in the face of its past and Stalinist crimes. Its closure is another, heralding a new wave of repression in a country ruled for almost twenty-two years by a man, Vladimir Poutin, more than ever determined to rewrite history and control civil society. “It is an area, history, which has become very political again. We are preserving the memory of millions of victims, Putin wants to keep history falsified ”, testifies Alexandre Tcherkassov, activist of long time and member of the board of directors of Memorial International, reached by telephone.
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