The Putin regime shuts down the leading civil-society and human-rights organization in Russia
Editor’s Note: The below is an expanded version of a piece published in the current issue of National Review.
Memorial has been called “the conscience of Russia.” “The keeper of the national memory.” It has also been called an “enemy of the people,” by defenders of the Soviet Union and of the current Russian government. The government has now shut that organization down.
Is Memorial, in fact, an organization? Yes. Or a civil-society group or a foundation. But it is also a network, a movement: an archipelago of groups and people, working with a common purpose.
That purpose is twofold: to find out and tell the truth about the past; and to promote democratic values in the present. Obviously, Memorial is intolerable to the regime of Vladimir Putin.
Memorial emerged in the late 1980s, during the Soviet Union’s period of glasnost and perestroika: a loosening. The first chairman of the group was Andrei Sakharov, the great physicist who became a great human-rights champion.
Sakharov was born in 1921, meaning that the year just past was his centennial year. He died in 1989, on December 14. The state opened its prosecution of Memorial in the Russian supreme court on December 14, 2021. (Of course, you could say that the real supreme court in Russia is Putin.) That date, according to Vladimir Kara-Murza, was not a coincidence.
Kara-Murza is a prominent democracy leader and writer. He was a lieutenant to Boris Nemtsov, the Russian opposition leader, murdered within sight of the Kremlin in 2015. Kara-Murza himself has survived two murder attempts (by poison).
Putin and his government are big on symbols, says Kara-Murza, and that includes dates. Putin awarded the Order of Merit for the Motherland to a senator from Chechnya, Suleiman Geremeyev, on February 27, 2020. Geremeyev is strongly suspected of involvement in the murder of Nemtsov — on February 27, 2015.
On June 4, 2021, Putin signed a law that essentially prohibits anyone connected to Alexei Navalny from running for office. Navalny is Russia’s most prominent political prisoner right now. His birthday is June 4.
Speaking of birthdays: Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in 2006, on October 7 — Putin’s birthday. Politkovskaya was an illustrious and brave journalist, and a sharp thorn in Putin’s side.
There is often occasion to quote Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion, now a human-rights champion: “I believe in coincidences, but I also believe in the KGB.”
Natalia Estemirova was another journalist, and worked for Memorial. In 2007, she won a prize named after Anna Politkovskaya. In 2009, she too was murdered — abducted from her home, shot up, and left in the woods. There are many such cases.
In July 1989, Memorial organized its first public event. It did not relate to Russia, exactly — but it certainly related to the question of democracy and tyranny. Memorial picketed the Chinese embassy in Moscow over the Tiananmen Square massacre. It was a display of solidarity, among other things.
For the past 30 or so years, the men and women of Memorial have engaged in a wide range of activities. They compiled a list of Soviet Gulag camps. They created a national database of victims — victims of state terror. They launched a project called “Last Address,” in which small plaques are placed on the last known addresses of the doomed. They have provided financial and legal aid to victims’ families. They have built libraries and museums, both physical and virtual.
They have also publicized names of victimizers — secret-police executioners. This has sat especially badly with the current government.
In the 1990s, Memorial was largely unmolested. Indeed, the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, was a member of Memorial. This changed when Putin rose to power at the end of the decade. Memorial’s offices were raided, officially. Or burned to the ground, unofficially, by masked arsonists.
One of Putin’s political prisoners is Yuri Dmitriev, a Memorial researcher in Karelia. He located and dug up mass graves. In 2017, I wrote a piece about him called “The Grave-Hunter, Hunted.” The government imprisoned him on trumped-up charges of child pornography and the like (an old tactic, favored by the KGB). In the last days of 2021, just as they were shutting down Memorial, the authorities lengthened Dmitriev’s prison sentence from 13 years to 15.
In 2018, the authorities imprisoned Oyub Titiev, a Memorial worker in Chechnya. (They first planted drugs in his car — that was their pretext.) After an international campaign of pressure, however, he was released the next year. I was able to interview him in 2020. I asked Titiev why he engaged in human-rights work, despite the dangers. Like most such workers, he could not really answer. Something in his conscience, or gut, impels him to do the work. He can do no other.
Starting in 2014, the Kremlin labeled Memorial a “foreign agent.” (It did so in stages, targeting one component of Memorial after another.) This is a damning charge, of course: that a person or organization is an agent, or tool, of foreigners, out to harm the nation. “Foreign agent” is akin to “enemy of the people.” Memorial has never been anything but a Russian movement: about Russians, for Russians.
Would you like to know something amusing — darkly so? Memorial earned the label “foreign agent” because the organization objected to Putin’s revival of that very label from Soviet days.
When the authorities finally shut Memorial down, it was on grounds that Memorial had violated Putin’s foreign-agent law. But the grounds were fundamentally irrelevant. A fig leaf. When a dictator decides, he decides.
Vladimir Putin’s regime began interestingly, at the end of the 1990s. He restored the plaque honoring Yuri Andropov at the Lubyanka, the secret-police headquarters in Moscow. Andropov was the KGB chief who rose to premier of the USSR. Putin then restored the national anthem that Stalin commissioned in the 1940s — although new words were put to the music. These were merely symbolic acts, but they said something: something about the relationship between post-Soviet Russia and the USSR.
Today, it is dangerous, if not criminal, to tell the truth about the Soviet Union in Russia. In 2016, a blogger, Vladimir Luzgin, stated a simple historical fact: The Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939. For this, he was prosecuted (and represented by a Memorial lawyer). Luzgin was lucky, getting off with a fine (a hefty one). He could have gone to prison.
By the way, the supreme court issued its ruling in this case on September 1, 2016. As you remember, Germany invaded Poland on September 1. The Soviets, in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet Pact, invaded on the 17th.
According to Memorial, there are 430 political prisoners in Russia right now — more than in the late Soviet period. And Memorial is applying strict criteria, when classifying political prisoners. Bear in mind, too, that one can classify only known cases. There are undoubtedly many unknown ones: people unofficially detained or “disappeared.”
Last October, Memorial screened the movie Mr Jones in its Moscow offices. The movie is about Gareth Jones, the Welshman who reported on the Soviets’ terror-famine in Ukraine, carried out in the early 1930s. Jones was murdered — almost certainly by Soviet agents — in 1935, the day before his 30th birthday.
As Memorial was screening the film, about 30 masked men burst in, yelling “Shame!” and halting the screening. Memorial staff called the police — who then locked the staff and the attendees into the offices, questioning them for hours, and requiring personal information from them: address, phone number, employer, etc.
It is natural for a dictatorship to want to control the past. To shape a people’s understanding of the past, which affects the present, and future. In the supreme court last December, the chief prosecutor, Alexei Zhafyarov, said, “Memorial creates a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state.” He also said that Memorial “makes us repent of the Soviet past, instead of remembering glorious history” — and “probably because someone is paying for it.”
A question: Why is the Russian government so intent on defending the Soviet Union and suppressing the truth about it? Vladimir Kara-Murza gives an answer so simple, and so obvious, it could be overlooked: Many of the people now in the government served the Soviet Union — including the strongman himself. He came from the very organization, the KGB, that implemented mass terror and murder. Many others in the current government came from that organization, too.
Who wants to be reminded of his past crimes? Or his present ones?
When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, a lot of people said, “No witch hunts. We must not have witch hunts.” They meant, “Forget accountability — too messy. Let’s just move on.” Kara-Murza, Kasparov, and others recall what leading Russian democrats of the time said: “If we fail to account, the witches will come back, and hunt us.”
Outside the supreme court last December, a crowd gathered to lend some kind of moral support to Memorial. This was reminiscent of Sakharov, who in 1975 stood outside the courtroom where his friend and fellow dissident Sergei Kovalev was being tried. On that very day, Sakharov was receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, in Oslo. He was receiving it in absentia, that is. The Kremlin had barred him from leaving the country. Outside the courtroom, at home, a guard said to Sakharov, “You are a disgrace to the Soviet Union.”
In reality, Sakharov was one of the best. So was Sergei Kovalev — who, like Sakharov, would go on to be chairman of Memorial.
Last November, some 100 members of the Russian Academy of Sciences signed an appeal, saying, “The destruction of Memorial is an attempt to deprive the nation of its memory, which we must not allow in order to avoid a repetition of the era of monstrous repression.”
On December 10, Dmitry Muratov received the Nobel Peace Prize, sharing it with Maria Ressa, a journalist from the Philippines. Unlike Sakharov, Muratov was allowed to be in Oslo. He is the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, one of the few independent outlets left in Russia. Six of his colleagues at the paper have been murdered, including Anna Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova.
In his address, Muratov spoke of Memorial and its impending strangulation. “Memorial is not an ‘enemy of the people,’” he said. “Memorial is a friend of the people.”
Kara-Murza says that Memorial will go on, maybe not with a formal structure, but in some informal way, as people, individually or together, try to perform the work. I believe that these people should be remembered by us foreigners. They are Russian, too — as Russian as Putin and his supporters. And they are patriots, if by patriotism we mean love of country, rather than power, money, and lies.
In November, Putin gave his Order of Friendship to the Hungarian foreign minister. It was presumably well earned. The Putin regime has many friends, and more enablers, in free countries. But who will be the friends of Yuri Dmitriev and other political prisoners? Who will speak out for Memorial?
Back in the 2000s, when he was free to work, Dmitriev grumbled, “We don’t know the past, and we don’t want to know.” This was when the regional government, in Karelia, erected a monument to Andropov. You can understand such frustration, and even despair. But there are many Russians who indeed want to know, and who greatly admire Dmitriev and his like.
Dmitriev compiled “books of remembrance,” in which he catalogued victims of state terror. In the foreword to one of his books, he said, “The moral of the story is brief: Remember! As is my advice: Take care of one another.”