Two courts have ruled that Memorial, a human-rights organization that documents Soviet state terror, must shut down. “We’ve done so little of what we had planned,” an executive director said.
The most important fact about Memorial, the Russian research and human-rights organization that the Kremlin wants to shut down, is this: no one knows exactly how many people fell victim to Soviet state terror between the Revolution of 1917 and the official dissolution of the U.S.S.R., thirty years ago last month. Memorial researchers estimate that about a million people were executed for alleged crimes against the state, out of some eleven million who were persecuted.
At the beginning, Memorial’s young founders imagined that their task was straightforward. “I thought everything was in the archives,” Zhemkova said. She and the others figured that, once the K.G.B. opened its books, historians would be able to piece together a complete picture of Soviet terror—and then create the museum complex they’d imagined.
In 2012, following an unprecedented wave of mass protests, Vladimir Putin began his third term as President by cracking down on the opposition. A new law required organizations that received foreign funding and engaged in political activity to register as “foreign agents” and to identify themselves as such in all their interactions with the public: on social media, in media interviews, in books they published, and so on.
The prosecution’s key message would sound familiar to Americans who have been following the backlash against the. “Why, instead of feeling proud of our country, which emerged victorious from a frightful war and liberated the world of fascism, are we supposed to feel shame, to repent for our past, which is presented as relentlessly dark?” the prosecutor Alexei Zhafyarov asked. “It’s probably because someone is paying for it.
“We just don’t fit in today’s landscape,” Alexander Cherkasov, the board chairman of Memorial Human Rights Center, said. The Kremlin aims to establish control everywhere. It even has its own organizations that claim to be independent of the government and to defend human rights. “So they look at organizations like ours and think, If they don’t serve us, whom do they serve? If they are not our agents, they must be someone else’s agents.
Within hours of the second ruling, the European Court of Human Rights ordered a stay of the decisions to shut down Memorial. Although Russia is obligated by treaty to observe the E.C.H.R. decisions, its actual record is spotty. Cherkasov, however, was optimistic. “It’s like an ambulance that arrived just as we were losing the patient,” he said. “It turns out there is life after death, and it’s interesting.
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