The Russian NGO Memorial, chronicler of the repression from Stalin to Putin

For three decades, the iconic Memorial NGO has documented the purges of the Stalinist era and then the repression of contemporary Russia from Vladimir Putin, of which she herself has ended up being a victim.

The Russian Supreme Court last Tuesday ordered the dissolution of Memorial for violating a controversial law on “foreign agents”, a decision that the NGO designates as political.

The liquidation could be the coup de grace for this organization that became a symbol of the democratization of the 1990s and the final drumbeat of a year 2021 marked by the Kremlin’s repression against its detractors.

During its existence, Memorial did not stop drawing the attention of the authorities, earning the enmity of many responsible and being the victim of reprisals that led to the murder.

Founded in 1989 by Soviet dissidents, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov, the organization was respected for its rigorous investigations of Stalinist crimes to abuses in Chechnya.

In 2009, the European Parliament awarded her the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, named after its distinguished co-founder.

In one of its last works, in March, the NGO identified and denounced paramilitaries from the “Wagner” organization for war crimes in Syria. According to its detractors and the accidental countries, this group acts on behalf of the Kremlin.

In parallel, Memorial also drew up a list of political prisoners to whom it offered assistance, as well as migrants and persons from sexual minorities.

“Enemies of the people”

It was especially his work in Chechnya, the Russian republic in the Caucasus scene of two wars, that made the NGO known in the West, where it enjoys great prestige.

In those two conflicts in the 1990s and 2000s, Memorial collaborators were on the ground, documenting abuses by Russian soldiers and their local reinforcements.

“Power always hated that,” said historian Irina Shcherbakova, one of the founders, in November.

In 2009, the head of the NGO in Chechnya, Natalia Estemirova, was kidnapped in broad daylight and shot to the head in Grozny.

Blamed for this murder, the authoritarian Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, accused the members of Memorial of being “enemies of the people.”

In 2018, the organization ended up withdrawing from that region due to the conviction of its local responsible in a drug case that they denounce as a setup.

I work for memory

According to its founders, Memorial began its activity before its official creation in 1989 with the aim of naming and remembering the millions of forgotten victims of Soviet repression.

In the 1960s and 1970s, dissident militants began to secretly collect information about these crimes. With the opening promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev in the final stretch of the USSR, they began to do it without hiding.

“Memorial is the heir of a movement and, later, of an organization that did not stop shouting loud and clear that it was very dangerous for the memory of the dictatorship to disappear from the collective consciousness,” summarized Shcherbakova.

With the arrival of Putin in 2000, this task was complicated because the Kremlin defended a historical interpretation underlining Russian power and minimizing Soviet crimes.

On December 9, Putin criticized his work, arguing that Nazi collaborators had been classified by Memorial as victims of Stalinism. Memorial replied that it was a one-off error, later corrected in its database of three million names.

Before the Supreme Court on Tuesday, prosecutor Alexei Yafiarov accused her of “creating a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state” and of seeking “to rehabilitate Nazi criminals.”

The NGO denounced other processes to silence it. In December, in another case that he denounces as a hoax, one of his historians, Yuri Dmitriev, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for “sexual violence”.