One of the recipients of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize is Memorial, the Russian organization, or network. Memorial is the largest civil-society organization, and the largest human-rights organization, in Russia. A year ago, the Kremlin banned it. But Memorial finds ways to continue, in the shadows and in exile.
I wrote about Memorial — its history, its work, its fate — last January: here.
One of the winners of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize was Dmitry Muratov, the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, a Russian independent newspaper. Six people at Novaya Gazeta have been murdered. In his Nobel lecture last year, Muratov took time to speak of Memorial, which was on the verge of strangulation by the Kremlin. “Memorial is not an ‘enemy of the people,’” he said. “Memorial is a friend of the people.”
Yan Rachinsky is the chairman of Memorial. (You will also see “Jan Raczynski,” etc.) As he has disclosed, the Kremlin ordered the people of Memorial not to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. Memorial said: Nothing doing.
In the mid-1930s, the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave its prize to a political prisoner of the Nazis: Carl von Ossietzky, a great man. Goering ordered Ossietzky to decline the prize. Ossietzky refused to decline it (though he of course was not released from prison to go to Oslo and receive the prize).
(Those interested in this episode — and in the Nobel Peace Prize in general — can consult a book of mine, Peace, They Say, a history of the prize.)
At the Nobel ceremony in Oslo on Saturday, Rachinsky spoke for Memorial. Early in his address, he explained what the organization does.
Memorial has two equally important main areas of work. The first is the establishment of historical memory about the period in our history known as the “Great Terror,” carried out by the Soviet state against its people.
And second,
Memorial fights for human rights in the countries formerly part of the Soviet Union.
The following is an interesting fact:
Today, the number of political prisoners in Russia is more than the total number in all of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the period of perestroika in the 1980s. The struggle for freedom has continued since the Soviet regime. Here, the past and the present come together.
Often, people will tell you, “Putin’s Russia is not the Soviet Union, you know!” One possible answer is: “Okay — but does Putin know?”
Yan Rachinsky says,
We are investigating and documenting crimes: crimes against individual human beings and against humanity . . . What we see as the root cause of these crimes is the sanctification of the Russian state as the supreme value. This requires that the absolute priority of power is to serve the “interests of the state” over the interests of individual human beings, and their freedom, dignity, and rights. In this inverted system of values, people are merely expendable material to be used for resolving governmental tasks. This is the system that prevailed in the Soviet Union for 70 years and regrettably continues ’til today.
In these few sentences, Mr. Rachinsky has given an important and powerful analysis.
He goes on to say,
One of the obvious effects of the sanctification of the state was the rise of imperial ambitions. Those ambitions grew into criminal aggression at the beginning of the Second World War with the attacks on Poland and Finland . . .
. . . and continued during the war and after — and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“In the Soviet empire,” Rachinsky says,
any attempts by peoples to fight for national independence or even simply manifest a national consciousness that did not fit the Soviet ideological dogma were declared to be “bourgeois nationalism” and were brutally suppressed. . . . And soon after Vladimir Putin came to power, the new Russian leadership and its ideological servants began violent and aggressive “memory wars” against their neighbors . . . while fully using old Soviet stereotypes and labels. Of course, this was done not for the sake of “historical truth” but for their own political interests. The result was that the Russian propaganda against “nationalism” . . . became the ideological justification for the insane and criminal war of aggression against Ukraine.
How many times have you been told that Putin’s forces are fighting “fascists” and “fascism” in Ukraine? You hear it from Kremlin propagandists, of course, but also from their echoers — their allies — in the Free World, including the United States. Here is Yan Rachinsky:
. . . in order to pass off aggression against a neighboring country as “fighting fascism,” it was necessary to twist the minds of Russian citizens by swapping the concepts of “fascism” and “anti-fascism.” Now the Russian mass media refer to the unprovoked armed invasion of a neighboring country, the annexation of territories, terror against civilians in the occupied areas, and war crimes as justified by the need to fight fascism.
Rachinsky continues,
Hatred is incited against Ukraine; its culture and language are publicly declared “inferior”; and the Ukrainian people are deemed not to have a separate identity from Russians. Resistance to Russia is called “fascism.” Such propaganda absolutely contradicts the historical experience of Russia and devalues and distorts the memory of the truly anti-fascist war of 1941 to 1945 and the Soviet soldiers who fought against Hitler. The words “Russian soldier” in the minds of many people will now be associated not with those who fought against Hitler but with those who sow death and destruction on Ukrainian soil.
Ukrainians, of course, are undergoing barely imaginable torment. But Russians such as Yan Rachinsky and his colleagues have their own torment.
Last in his address, Rachinsky takes up the question of guilt and responsibility. This is an old and recurring question, of course. Charles Krauthammer used to write about it: “collective guilt” versus “collective responsibility.” Krauthammer came down on the side of responsibility, as, of course, does Rachinsky.
Memorial has been called “the conscience of Russia.” It is anathema to Putin and his circle, and their supporters and enablers worldwide. Memorial was founded at the instigation of Andrei Sakharov, who served as its first chairman. Sakharov won the Nobel Peace Prize (in 1975). Now Memorial has, too.
Thinking of the Russians who constitute Memorial, I think of a line from José Martí, the Cuban independence hero: “When there are many men who lack honor, there are always others who have within themselves the honor of many men.”