Russia’s oldest civil rights organization, which dealt with coming to terms with Soviet history and gave the victims a voice, is in fact banned. The allegations were the pretext for rejecting an attitude that is opposed to today’s powerful.
Police officers lead a man in front of the courthouse who wanted to support the Memorial organization with a poster. It says, next to the organization’s logo: “We will always live.”
Russia’s Supreme Court on Tuesday granted the application by the Prosecutor General, the Ministry of Justice and the Roskomnadzor censorship agency and ordered the dissolution of Russia’s oldest and most important civil rights organization, Memorial International. First and foremost, Memorial was accused of systematically violating the legislation on so-called “foreign agents”, ie non-governmental organizations and media financed from abroad, and thus violating the rights enshrined in the constitution. The legal representatives announced an appeal, including at the European Court of Human Rights.
Cynical arguments
The argument of the representatives of Memorial and their legal defenders that it would be disproportionate to close an organization with so much social charisma, historical significance and enormous merits just because of alleged technical misconduct, ricocheted off the judge Alla Nazarova. In any case, the plaintiffs were always interested in more.
This became increasingly clear in the course of the proceedings, which were spread over several days, and finally in the pleadings of the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Memorial no longer fits into a state policy of remembrance that only emphasizes the splendor of the past and relativizes the dark sides of Soviet history as a regrettable but painful deviation. “Why should we, the descendants of the winners, be ashamed and show remorse instead of being proud of our glorious past?” Asked the prosecutor Alexei Shafyarov in the closing speech.
He even took up a phrase that had previously been used against Memorial by the Association of “Veterans of Russia”: The organization paints a lying picture of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state. He linked that to foreign funding and Memorial’s dissatisfaction with being classified as a “foreign agent.” Such a thing can only be sponsored from abroad, and of course the organization doesn’t want to hang it up.
The allegation that Memorial preaches dialogue was particularly cynical, but the organization’s events regularly degenerated into chaos. The public prosecutor’s office concealed the fact that this came from foreign intruders sponsored by state or para-state structures and tolerated by the police, such as in October during a film showing.
Perfidious new allegations
While the trial was in progress, the prosecution got involved in questioning whether Memorial was properly applying the Agents Act. The representatives of the organization tried to prove that they had quickly resolved the complaints about the correct marking of their public appearances. They also pointed out that they had repeatedly requested clarifications from the Justice Ministry and Roskomnadzor on exactly how to obey the law. But the prosecution suspected that the organization did not want to obey the law because they rejected it in terms of content. This, too, was interpreted as a kind of misconception.
Suddenly completely new arguments also played a role subliminally. An Israeli historian pointed out in August that the lists of rehabilitated victims of the Stalinist repression included individual names of people who had participated in Nazi crimes. Patriotic associations like the “Veterans of Russia” gratefully took this up and accused Memorial of appearing as supporters of Nazi sentiments. Memorial officials vehemently rejected this. There are always errors in the lists, but these are corrected immediately.
Memory work under pressure
Under the guise of justice and equality before the law, the Russian state of today judges the “wrong” sentiments just like the henchmen of the Soviet regime, for which the victims remembered by Memorial and the dissident founders of the organization were convicted. Maria Eismont, one of the defenders in the process, said that the dissolution of the organization would lead back to the political repression of the Soviet era.
The liquidation of the organization that is so important for Russia’s memory, co-founded by Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov and benevolently accompanied by then President Mikhail Gorbachev, is a devastating judgment on Russia today and its rulers. Just a few years ago, President Vladimir Putin himself opened the Wall of Sorrow, a memorial to the victims of Stalin’s repression in downtown Moscow. The state is funding a modern gulag museum in Moscow.
At the same time, in the course of the upsurge in national patrioticism and ever more rigid control of everything that does not conform to official doctrine, the scope for remembrance work has become narrower and narrower. What used to be the only museum that was set up in a former Gulag prison camp is now dominated by the perpetrators’ perspective.
The educational programs for schools, the writing competitions to allow students from all over Russia to grapple with the history of their families during the Stalinist era, were increasingly restricted. At a time when “patriotism” is only promoted in the educational institutions in a form of absolute devotion defined by the state, the perspective of the victims of this state becomes a provocation.