Putin is banning the group that memorializes Stalin’s crimes. That’s bad for Russia

Oleg Orlov, board member of Memorial rights group, poses at an exhibition about political repressions in the group's office in Moscow on Nov. 15. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images)
Oleg Orlov, board member of Memorial rights group, poses at an exhibition about political repressions in the group's office in Moscow on Nov. 15. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images)

Russian President Vladimir Putin is on the verge of liquidating his country’s most important civic organization. Since its founding more than three decades ago, the Memorial Society has pursued a dual mission: to document and increase public awareness of mass repressions during the Soviet era and to promote human rights in today’s Russia.

If Memorial is destroyed, none of the few remaining Russian nongovernmental organizations that dare to assert their independence from the Kremlin will be safe. Shutting down Memorial will jeopardize not just the work performed by its courageous staff and the unique archive of historical documents they have amassed, but also the future of civil society itself in the Russian Federation.

Right now, Western capitals appear to be focused on the Russian troop buildup along the border with Ukraine as well as the refugee crisis cynically manufactured by Moscow’s vassal state, Belarus, on its border with Poland. But the looming assault on Memorial is no less significant. During the Cold War, Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov — who served as Memorial’s first honorary chairman — had the audacity to assert that only countries that respected basic human rights were likely to be responsible actors in the international arena. That remains the case even — or especially — in our own era of disinformation and censorship.

When Memorial was formally recognized in 1989, as the Soviet Union was unraveling, a new category had to be created within Soviet law: that of the nongovernmental organization. Under Soviet rule, numerous groups had posed as independent citizens associations, but all were subject to strict control by the Communist Party. Many were in fact initiated by the authorities to foster the illusion of autonomous citizen engagement in public affairs. This facsimile of civil society caused immeasurable damage to public life by nourishing the belief that no organization was or could be genuinely independent of the state — or of other hidden hands.

The Putin government has leveraged that cynicism by insisting that Russians who point out human rights violations in their country constitute a fifth column serving hostile powers. Any nonprofit organization that receives donations from sources outside Russia and engages in “political activity” has been legally required since 2012 to identify itself as a “foreign agent” — a term equivalent in Russian to “foreign spy.”

This toxic label must appear on every publication, every video, every website and every public event sponsored by such organizations. The Russian chief prosecutor claims that because Memorial failed to include the “foreign agent” label on certain pages of its website and on certain of its publications (including some that were produced before it was branded a “foreign agent”), the organization should be liquidated. In addition, Memorial is charged with “justifying terrorism and extremism” because some of the more than 400 individuals it lists as current “political prisoners” — among them the jailed anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny — are considered by the Kremlin to have engaged in such activities.

What Memorial has actually done is tell the sober, carefully documented truth to the Russian public. Sakharov made the case that human rights, and specifically free speech and the free flow of information, were vital preconditions of good governance. Only policies based on “deep analysis of facts, theories, and views, presupposing unprejudiced, fearless open discussion and conclusions” could secure a society’s interests in the long run.

Natalia Solzhenitsyn agrees. The widow of the acclaimed writer, Gulag survivor and Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn has declared that “the closure of Memorial will cause direct and very serious damage to both society and the state.” Russian journalist Dmitri Muratov, this year’s co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, says that Memorial is “not an enemy of the people, it is a friend of the people,” the “most important antidote against repressions.”

When he first came to power, Putin appeared to share these sentiments. “There should always be people who criticize the authorities,” he told National Public Radio in 2001. “At the end of the day, it is good for the authorities, because what these people are trying to do is casting light on a problem from a perspective that the authorities themselves may fail to notice.” He continues to talk like this, including at the dedication in 2017 of “The Wall of Grief,” a national monument to the victims of Soviet terror. Under Putin, public monuments to both Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn have been erected.

But these and similar gestures have become part of a peculiar “hybrid warfare” strategy, this one directed at Russian society rather than the West. Even as Putin pays public lip service to the victims of Soviet repression, his government is dismantling all genuinely independent sources of authority within Russia. In Memorial’s case, this involves the Orwellian tactic of invoking the battle against terrorism to prosecute an organization dedicated to documenting Soviet state-sponsored terror and to making sure nothing like it recurs.

How is it that an association formed by and for the descendants of the roughly 18 million Soviet citizens sent to Stalin’s Gulag — several million of whom never returned — gets stigmatized as a “foreign agent”? “We are not agents of anyone,” Memorial’s executive director, Yelena Zhemkova, announced at a recent news conference. “We ourselves decide what and how to work.” In Putin’s Russia, that ethos is now an endangered species.

Benjamin Nathans, associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, is author of the forthcoming “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement.”

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