The Russian organization Memorial, which was liquidated on Tuesday 28 by the Supreme Court, has spent the last 30 years investigating both Soviet political repressions up to 1991 and denouncing human rights abuses committed in Russia since the fall of the USSR.
“We have a very complicated past, but the present is no less so. In Russia’s past there are no less horrible secrets than in the Latin American countries that lived under a dictatorship. That is to say, terror, disappearance of people and summary executions ”, commented Alexandr Cherkásov, director of Memorial.
It was formally founded in 1991, although it had already been in operation since the previous year, coinciding with the disintegration of the USSR, in order to keep alive the memory of the millions of people who were retaliated by the totalitarian communist state.
Its founders include the Soviet scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1975, father of the hydrogen bomb and a pioneer in the defense of human rights in this country.
The voice of the victims of Stalinism
From the beginning, Memorial emphasized the rehabilitation and defense of the victims of Stalinism, for which it created a database of reprisals, which can be consulted by any interested party.
Even before the fall of the USSR, Memorial succeeded in passing a law on the rehabilitation of victims of political repression, from which hundreds of thousands of people have since benefited.
In addition, thanks to their efforts, a memorial to the victims of the GULAG, the Soviet labor camps, was installed in front of the KGB building in Lubyanka Square.
That rock, which was expressly brought from the Solovki archipelago, considered the first GULAG in history, was for nine months next to the statue of the founder of the KGB, Felix Dzerzhinski, which would eventually be removed.
Historical memory archive
Already in the 21st century, he created a file that includes all those who fought in the ranks of the Russian Army, the objective of which is that the relatives of the veterans know the fate of those who died or disappeared in action.
Its historians have investigated matters very sensitive to the authorities, such as the massacre of more than 20,000 Polish officers in Katyn, which was denied for decades by the Kremlin, for which they have demanded the declassification of the secret documents.
Russia’s oldest NGO also organized an international conference on the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, kidnapped by the KGB after saving the lives of 50,000 Jews in Budapest during World War II and who allegedly died in Moscow in 1947.
Memorial is dedicated to denouncing abuses by the authorities throughout the national territory, but also in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Georgia, among other countries, in addition to violations of humanitarian laws during conflicts.
Critical of Putin’s authoritarianism
A defender of the rule of law in Russia in the face of the return of totalitarianism, he has been highly critical of the growing authoritarian tendencies in the Kremlin, especially since Russian President Vladimir Putin returned to the Kremlin in 2012.
The organization has especially criticized the law that restricts freedom of demonstration, that limited international adoptions or that persecuted homosexual propaganda.
He has also questioned the Russian role in the war in Ukraine, which has earned him some vandalism by ultra-nationalists.
Criticism of the situation in Chechnya cost the life of the director of its subsidiary in Grozny, Elena Estemírova, who was assassinated in 2009, a crime of which many directly accuse the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.
The murder forced Memorial to close its offices in Chechnya, where Kadyrov has established a police state where reprisals and kidnappings are common, according to his critics.
He has stood up to the Russian authorities, both in local courts and in the European Court of Human Rights to prevent the forcible repatriation of migrants to Central Asia, where they would most likely be imprisoned or tortured.
Foreign agent
In 2016, she was classified as a “foreign agent” by the Ministry of Justice for carrying out political activities with foreign funding, as happened before with prestigious organizations such as the Levada Center or Golos.
Justice accused him of receiving funding from organizations considered unwanted by the Russian government such as the US National Endowment for Democracy.
Its activists participated in anti-government protests against government fraud that erupted after the legislative elections in December 2011, the largest since the fall of the USSR.
Memorial, which received the Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament in 2009, had been promoted numerous times for the Nobel Peace Prize, among others by former Polish President Lech Walesa.
Last November, the Russian Prosecutor’s Office addressed the Supreme Court with a demand for liquidation for alleged violations of the Constitution and the breach of his functions as a foreign agent.
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