Putin establishes an increasingly repressive “dictatorship”, says founder of NGO Memorial

The threat of dissolution that weighs on the NGO Memorial, a pillar of the defense of human rights in Russia, shows the sudden acceleration of the dictatorial drift of the regime of President Vladimir Putin, considered one of the founders of the organization.

“The fact that the situation deteriorates so sharply and that the dictatorship becomes increasingly repressive, in such an assumed way, was unexpected.”Admits Irina Shcherbakova, 72, a historian who was involved in the creation of Memorial in 1989.

Since November 11, the oldest NGO in the country, symbol of the democratization movement launched in the decline of the Soviet Union, has been threatened with judicial liquidation.

The prosecution accuses the organization, which groups around fifty entities, of having violated “systematically” the law of “foreign agents“, A classification reminiscent of”enemies of the people“From the Soviet era.

This law obliges suspected NGOs to comply with innumerable bureaucratic formalities, worthy of a Kafkaesque novel, on pain of being banned or suffering criminal sanctions.

Worse still, the Memorial’s human rights protection center is accused of defending “extremist and terrorist activities” by publishing a list of political prisoners on religious grounds.

Among those prisoners are members of banned Islamist or Christian organizations such as Hizb Ut-Tahrir or Jehovah’s Witnesses.

A signal directed to the West

With the liquidation of Memorial – court hearings are scheduled for November – Russian authorities say they are “ready to use all force, all necessary violence“And thus demonstrate”that no one is protected, that ‘there is no court, there is no law’”, Dice Irina Shcherbakova.

This judicial offensive ended up shocking a Russian civil society hard hit in recent months with the poisoning and later imprisonment of the main opponent of the Kremlin, Alexei Navalni, a ban on his movement, media classified as “foreign agents”, opponents excluded from the legislative elections autumn and other measures.

Irina Shcherbakova is under no illusions and fears that the decision to ban the Memorial “has already been taken “, even before the November 25 hearing before the Supreme Court.

Vladimir Putin’s regime sends a new signal of strength to the West to signify that it does “what you want with your civil society“Regardless of the protests, says the historian.

Since its founding, Memorial has tirelessly documented the crimes of the USSR, collecting thousands of files, objects and testimonies for its exhibitions.

At the same time, the NGO fights for the protection of human rights in the country.

He distinguished himself in particular for investigating abuses committed by Chechen and Russian forces during the Chechen wars of the 1990s and 2000s.

The organization targeted powerful Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and his men, accused of extrajudicial executions, torture and kidnappings.

In 2009, its representative in this Caucasian republic, Natalia Estemirova, was kidnapped and murdered with impunity.

More recently, in the fall of 2020, one of its historians, Yuri Dmitriev, was sentenced to 13 years in prison in a case of “sexual violence”Denounced as a trap to punish him for his investigation into the Stalinist repression.

Die today, die tomorrow

Despite increasing repression and some apathy in Russian society, “we must fight, our only weapon is transparency ”and“ the conviction that the truth is on our side”, Dice Irina Shcherbakova.

The militant consoles herself by saying that thanks to the technological advances of the 21st century, thousands of documents on the memory of the Gulag are digitized and can be consulted online and, therefore, it is “impossibleDestroy them.

Instead, Shcherbakova fears the accelerated diffusion in public opinion, under the influence of the Kremlin, of “fallacious patriotic myths”That exalt the power of the USSR and ignore the Soviet terror and its millions of victims.

“This is the terrible legacy of the Stalinist dictatorship and the Gulag: the atomization of society, individualism and cynicism.”, He maintains.

To illustrate the fatalism of Russians in the face of arbitrariness, Irina Shcherbakova quotes the phrase of one of the characters of the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of the Gulag Archipelago: “You bust today, I tomorrow!”.