Coup de grace
Article reserved for subscribers
A pillar of the defense of human rights, the association founded in 1988 by historians to shed light on the crimes of communism was dissolved Tuesday by the Supreme Court, after years of struggle against an increasingly repressive Kremlin.
“Why should we, the descendants of the overcomers, be ashamed and repent instead of being proud of our glorious past?” Here, captured in one sentence by the prosecutor Jafiarov, the real stake of the Memorial trial, which just ended on Tuesday with the liquidation of the association. The recognition, undoubtedly quite involuntary, of an obviousness: if this trial formally dealt with the law on “foreign agents”, of so-called “Repeated violations” of this law by the NGO for the defense of human rights and its legal structure, if prosecutors and lawyers have opposed in oratory games on the details of this law, the forms of the text “warning” including the “agents of abroad ”are supposed to preface their publications, the very concept of“ publication ”… all this was only a transparent pretext.
Thirty years after the fall
What happened during this trial was the clash of two visions of Soviet history and two legitimacies to tell it. That of the Russian state, which wants to be the heir of the USSR and the holder of a ripolinée history, rid of its roughness, uniformly heroic and based on the founding myth of the victory of 1945. Against that of a part of Russian civil society, heirs of glasnost, upholding the duty of inventory and memory on the dark pages of Soviet history, those of totalitarianism and Stalinist repressions.
National-conservative turn
Memorial is the torchbearer. Founded in 1988, so q …