Editorial of the “World”. The circle is complete. Born in the late 1980s, within civil society, thanks to the opening attempted by the last Soviet number one, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russian association for the defense of human rights Memorial was dissolved on Tuesday December 28 in Moscow by a Supreme Court under the orders of the Kremlin and Vladimir Poutine. More than a symbol, it is a turning point in the history of post-Soviet Russia.
Memorial’s journey from democratic hope to banishment illustrates the political development of Russia over the past three decades. Originally created to shed light on political repression throughout the history of the USSR and to promote the rehabilitation of its victims, Memorial counted among its founders a genuine Democrat, the academician and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov , died in December 1989. After the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Memorial changed from the status of a dissident organization to that of a publicly recognized association.
During the 1990s, under the reign of Boris Yeltsin, Memorial historians were able to benefit from the collaboration of archives, libraries and universities. They focused on the crimes of Stalinism, explored the places of the greatest repressions, collected objects and documents, laid bare mass graves and mass graves. Over the years, they’ve compiled an unfinished list of the names of three million gulag victims.
A “foreign agent”
The environment became more difficult in the 2000s, after the coming to power of Vladimir Putin. Memorial had extended its field of activity to the defense of human rights. In 2009, one of his investigators in Chechnya, Natalia Estemirova, was kidnapped and murdered. For archivists and researchers, collaborating with Memorial has become dangerous.
More importantly, Memorial’s scientific work competed with Vladimir Putin’s desire to control the national historical narrative. The Russian president has launched an in-depth movement aimed at repoliticizing the history of the Soviet Union, even if it means rewriting it, by glorifying the role of Stalin during the Second World War. In 2016, the NGO Memorial was decreed “Foreign agent”, like all associations benefiting from outside subsidies. That same year, one of Memorial’s most bitter historians, Yuri Dmitriev, 65, was arrested and charged with sexual abuse. Monday, he saw his sentence increased to fifteen years in prison.
Before the Supreme Court, the prosecutor accused Memorial of having “Created a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state” and to have blackened the memory of the country during the “Great Patriotic War”. Formally, the decision to dissolve was justified by the failure of the NGO to identify itself as “Foreign agent” in some documents.
The year 2021 began in Russia with the imprisonment of the opponent Alexeï Navalny for two and a half years. She continued with a ban on her movement in June for “Extremism”; it ends with the liquidation of Memorial. That same Tuesday, several supporters of Alexei Navalny were arrested.
These three post-USSR decades looked more and more like a parenthesis, the closure of which we saw inexorably approaching. Russia is now locked: even memory must be controlled there by a nostalgic power of an illusory past greatness.