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. Memorial has been working for more than three decades to document Soviet terror, but a full accounting is still years away. On December 28th and 29th, two Russian courts ruled that two organizations that make up Memorial—its historical-research arm and its human-rights arm, which are two separate legal entities—must shut down. The legal pretext for these rulings is alleged violations of convoluted rules imposed on Memorial because the state has designated it a “foreign agent”; the real reason for the rulings is that the regime sees Memorial as an enemy of the Russian state.
Memorial began in the heady days of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. “It was a time when the desire for truth seemed to take hold of everyone,” Elena Zhemkova, the executive director of the research arm of Memorial, told me. Magazines and newspapers began writing about the Gulag and about the mass executions of the nineteen-thirties. Zhemkova, who was a graduate student in mathematics, found herself both shocked and ashamed. “I kept asking myself, ‘How could I, a grown woman of twenty-seven, not know any of this?’ ” In November, 1987, Zhemkova attended a large town-hall-style meeting on political persecution. Out of several hundred attendees, eleven people—none of whom knew any of the others well—stayed after the meeting to discuss the need for a memorial to the victims of the Soviet regime. Over the next few weeks, they wrote a petition for the creation of a memorial complex that would include a museum and a publicly accessible archives and library. Former dissidents and professional and self-taught historians joined the project, which they called Memorial. Similar efforts were taking shape all over the U.S.S.R., in large cities and small towns: a network of hundreds of groups and individuals who also called themselves Memorial.
As the Soviet Union was falling apart, armed conflicts flared up all over the empire. In 1991, Memorial decided to extend its research focus into the present. Since then, Memorial Human Rights Center has compiled accounts of human-rights abuses in conflict zones (most notably in Chechnya), brought lawsuits on behalf of victims (particularly refugees and internally displaced persons), and documented political persecution and assembled lists of political prisoners in the post-Soviet countries of Central Asia and, later, in Russia. In December, 2011, when Russians took to the streets to protest rigged elections and the state responded with mass detentions, Memorial spawned another project: OVDInfo, a news site and an essential legal-resource center for protesters. Memorial has provided office space and acted as a fiscal sponsor for OVDInfo. One of the newer organization’s founders was the child of a Memorial historian who co-founded its academic research center.
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 late 1991, the Supreme Soviet of Russia passed a law that condemned political persecution and laid the groundwork for exonerating and compensating its victims. The K.G.B. opened its archives to historians, including those from Memorial. But, within a couple of years after the end of the U.S.S.R., the successor agencies to the K.G.B. had restricted access to the archives. Separately, the work of state committees charged with reviewing cases slowed to a crawl; only about four million of the estimated 11.5 million cases have been reviewed. Many regional memory activists lost interest or even changed their minds about the Soviet past. (For my book “Never Remember: Looking for Stalin’s Gulag in Putin’s Russia,” I interviewed a woman who had started a Gulag museum in Kolyma, the Far Eastern region where some of Stalin’s most brutal camps were built; after more than two decades, she was still running the museum but no longer believed that most of the inmates had been innocent.) What had started as the expression of the people’s will to know the truth became an increasingly marginalized movement.
“We’ve done so little of what we had planned,” Zhemkova said, when we talked in the Memorial offices after the December court rulings. The organization does have a ten-thousand-square-foot building, in central Moscow, which includes a dramatic two-story-tall auditorium and screening room, a basement exhibit space, a library, offices where desks are piled with books and binders, the document archives, and a collection of some eight thousand objects donated by Gulag survivors and their families. At this headquarters, Memorial has mounted a series of shows. The current one, called “Fabric,” uses clothes and other sewn and knit objects, including letters and memoirs written or typed on cloth, to tell the stories of women in the Gulag. One of the curators, Irina Scherbakova, took me on a tour of the show on December 29th, the day that the second court decision came down. A half-dozen people walked in off the street, one or two at a time, to join the tour. “A problem with our memory is that—unlike, say, with Nazi concentration camps—there is no film footage and virtually no photography,” Scherbakova said. Nor are there many objects: inmates had almost no possessions. Unlike Nazi concentration camps, the Gulag hasn’t inspired feature films that might have become popular enough to create lasting visual images of the terror. What Memorial has collected, and what it can put on display, offers a very rare opportunity for people to visualize the Soviet camps. “And if we survive—and if we can keep this show going for some time—then we will add QR codes for people to access the stories of people whose objects are on display,” Scherbakova said at the end of the tour.
Memorial’s most ambitious projects focus on names. One is called “The Return of the Names,” an annual event during which people in several cities in Russia and around the world read out the names of people executed during Stalin’s terror. In Moscow, the event is held in front of the F.S.B. (formerly K.G.B.) headquarters; people have been reading names from 10 a.m. until 10 p.m., on October 29th, every year since 2007, and they are still only about halfway through the list of some thirty thousand names of people executed in Moscow alone from 1937 to 1938. Another project, called “The Last Address,” affixes postcard-size metal plaques to the walls of buildings where victims lived before their arrests. Since 2014, the project has mounted eleven hundred plaques in fifty-nine Russian cities and towns—a huge effort that represents only a tiny fraction of the people who died at the hands of the Soviet state. Crucially, Memorial has been compiling a database of names of people unjustly prosecuted in the Soviet Union. The undertaking began in 1998. The first CD, published in 2001, contained a hundred and thirty thousand names. The project has grown to an online database of three million people—which means it’s only about a quarter of the way to a complete accounting.
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. Memorial was among the first organizations to be branded a “foreign agent,” in 2013. In the years since, Memorial has appealed the decision repeatedly and lost, and has racked up millions of rubles in fines for ostensibly failing to identify itself as a “foreign agent.” But it has continued to work and even to grow.
In the last year or so, attacks on Memorial intensified. The organization was raided by police, attacked by self-appointed defenders of the Russian state, and defamed in state media. In November, the federal prosecutor general and the Moscow prosecutor filed lawsuits demanding that the Memorial Research Center and the Memorial Human Rights Center, respectively, be shut down by the order of the state. (The two organizations are registered in different jurisdictions.) The prosecutors proceeded to argue that Memorial’s ostensible failure to mark every single publicly available document with the “foreign agent” disclaimer violated the rights of Russian citizens to freedom of information, violated various international conventions, and could cause readers to become depressed.
The propaganda war against Memorial has focussed on other issues. In August, 2021, Aron Shneyer, a Russian-speaking Israeli historian, wrote, in two Facebook posts, that he had found the names of three Nazi collaborators in Memorial’s database of victims of unjust prosecution. “Shame on Memorial,” the first post began. (I asked Shneyer, by Facebook Messenger, how he had come across the names; he responded that he was “sick of the whole Memorial sewer.”) The next day, Russian state television reported on Shneyer’s supposed discovery under the headline “Memorial’s Fascists.” Memorial removed the names from the database. Zhemkova explained that they had come from a list of the unjustly prosecuted compiled by the authorities of the Komi region, which, in turn, was based on the card catalogue of local Gulag camps. On December 9th, Putin publicly answered a journalist’s question about Memorial. The Russian President said that he used to believe that Memorial was a humanitarian organization but had recently learned that it was defending Nazi collaborators as well as present-day terrorists and extremists. Two weeks later, a local court ordered that access to OVDInfo’s Web site be blocked in Russia, allegedly for defending extremists and terrorists. OVDInfo believes that the ruling stems from its reporting on the trials of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the pan-Islamist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, both of which are banned in Russia. At the court hearings, one of the prosecutors accused Memorial Human Rights Center of defending extremists and “the most radical of protesters,” while another accused Memorial Research Center of including tens of thousands of Nazi collaborators in its database.
The prosecution’s key message would sound familiar to Americans who have been following the backlash against the 1619 Project. “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. And that’s the true reason behind Memorial’s evident reluctance to admit that it’s a foreign agent.”
“It is clear that Memorial is using the topic of political repressions of the twentieth century to create the false image of the U.S.S.R. as a terrorist country,” Zhafyarov said. Now he was getting to the substance of the conflict between the Russian state and Memorial. From its beginning, more than three decades ago, Memorial has used the term “state terror” to refer to the crimes it has documented. The more common and palatable term used in Russia is “political repression,” a phrase that is not only milder but also amorphous. It makes the deaths and arrests of millions sound like something akin to a natural disaster or perhaps a pandemic—a tragedy beyond human control. But Memorial, Zhemkova said, has always asked, “How did it happen that state structures, paid for by the people, came to kill the people? This is a relevant question today.”
Putin’s government may prefer that the history of Soviet terror not be remembered at all, but, thanks in large part to the work Memorial has done, this is not an option. So the government is waging a battle over who controls this history. In recent years, the state has unveiled a monument to the victims of the Gulag, in central Moscow, and opened a modest museum of the Gulag, on an out-of-the-way street in the city. Although these projects lack the texture and complexity of Memorial’s work, they are positive developments, Zhemkova said. “These are reference points for the state’s memory work,” she said. “Civil society cannot do its own memory work without the state.” But the Russian state would apparently prefer to do the memory work without civil society.
“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.” As a student of twentieth-century dictatorships, Cherkasov said, he knows that structures created by tyrants quickly take on lives of their own and start destroying, because that’s what they are designed to do.
When Memorial went to court, its leaders and its lawyers knew that they’d lose. Still, for two days, in two different courts, they made their case. Speaking on December 29th, the defense attorney Ilya Novikov said, “People ask me why I agreed to work on this case, knowing that it’s hopeless…. This ship is going down with its flag flying high.”
Outside the courthouse, a crowd of several dozen supporters, journalists, and Memorial staff waited in the bracing cold, stomping their feet on the snow to keep warm. Memorial staff members waited with flowers—red and white roses for each member of their legal team. Each of the lawyers spoke briefly on the steps of the courthouse. Attorney Grigory Vaypan, the last to speak, compared the decision to Soviet political prosecutions. “There is no doubt that sooner or later—I hope sooner rather than later—this decision too will be deemed unjust and illegal.” The crowd applauded. Behind me, one of a small group of teen-agers said, “We will live that long.” “We will live that long,” his friends echoed. “Now could we please go someplace warm?”
It’s not clear what happens to Memorial next. The organizations will appeal the decisions. They will probably lose the appeal and face the requirement to shut down sometime in the spring. At that point, they will be in uncharted territory. The archives may be saved and stored elsewhere, but, Zhemkova said, “an archive is only alive as long as it’s used.” No one knows what can or will happen to a building owned by an organization that the state has ordered closed.
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.”
That night, Memorial was scheduled to have its annual New Year’s party. The staff rallied and decorated the large, dramatic space designed for lectures and film screenings. (The last screening, in October, was interrupted when a mob of unidentified thugs stormed the place.) All day, people had been coming to bring presents. A baker sent over sixty fruitcakes for staff members. A man came in with a giant package. “We found his grandfather in the archives years ago,” Scherbakova told me, “and he has brought presents every year since.”
Zhemkova and several others gave toasts, straining to find notes of happiness amid grief. “As often happens, tragic days are also days of unity, love, new friendships, and laughter,” Maria Eismont, one of the defense attorneys, said. “The last thing we should be doing now is cry, because this is the state’s main goal—to make us all sad and separate from one another.”
The crowd honored people who had suffered for trying to defend Memorial. Aleksei Belenkin, who was arrested for holding up a sign in front of the courthouse during a preliminary hearing, was recently released from jail, after serving twenty-five days. A young man who was arrested for the same thing on December 28th had faced a court on the 29th and was sentenced to only a fine—practically a New Year’s present from the Russian state. The man’s sign had said, “We will live forever,” which is a quote from a song by popular alt-rock singer Vasya Oblomovl. The music video that Oblomov had made for Memorial now played on the screen: photos of victims of Stalinist terror, engulfed in fire, one after another reduced to ashes. “We will live forever” was the refrain. One of the lawyers who had represented Memorial in court that morning, Tatyana Glushkova, looked at the screen with tears in her eyes and sang along.
The Russian Memory Project That Became an Enemy of the State. By Masha Gessen. The New Yorker, January 6, 2022.
The
closure of Memorial, one of the oldest civil rights groups in Russia, caused an
outcry in the country and around the world. It had been prominent in uncovering
the crimes of the Stalinist regime and remembering the victims of the Gulag.
But the authorities accused the organisation of trying to undermine the state
order.
Here, BBC Russian looks at what made Memorial so important.
Here, BBC Russian looks at what made Memorial so important.
For over 30 years, Memorial worked on uncovering the fates of the victims of Soviet political repressions. It also exposed human rights abuses in present-day Russia.
Its work never sat comfortably with the authorities. It was initially cautioned in 2006, and in 2014 it was added to the list of "foreign agents" - a roster of organisations and individuals the government claims receive funding from abroad.
The label is a poignant reminder of the 1930s mass repressions in the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Then, many victims were wrongfully accused of being foreign agents, traitors and enemies of the people.
It is ironic that Memorial, an organisation finding out what happened to those accused of being foreign agents nearly a century ago, ended up with the same label.
A pretext for closing the group was its failure to mark some of its social media posts with a "foreign agent" disclaimer, which it is legally required to do.
Memorial's lawyer Tatyana Glushkova stresses the group marked most of its posts and online pages as required and paid fines when it failed to do so.
The group and its supporters say the accusation was just a formal excuse to close down an organisation voicing uncomfortable truths.
Sakharov's legacy
Memorial was set up in 1987 - at the time of reforms introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika - and initially led by Andrei Sakharov, a famous Soviet dissident scientist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Sakharov and those in his circle wanted to focus on uncovering the true scale of the repression which took place under Josef Stalin - Soviet leader between 1929 and 1953. During this period tens of millions of people are believed to have perished in the Gulag forced labour camps.
In 1990, a Memorial team travelled to the Solovky camp in the north of Russia - formerly one of the most notorious in the Gulag. They brought back a memorial stone to be placed in central Moscow.
The Solovetsky stone now sits in the Lubyanka square, opposite the imposing building of the Russian security service, the FSB, (formerly NKVD and later the KGB). It is meant to serve as a reminder of Russia's grim history.
Memorial also investigated more recent human rights abuses in Russia and other post-Soviet countries. A centre for human rights was created as a separate arm of the organisation in 1991. It has been providing legal and other assistance to those considered to be political prisoners and their families.
Yan Rachinskiy, the chairman of Memorial, says it's ironic that the organisation is being liquidated in the year of Andrei Sakharov's centenary.
What was the Gulag?
A state network of prison camps in the Soviet Union, the name Gulag derives from a Russian acronym for Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerei, or chief administration of camps.
Initially set up under the first Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, it grew under Josef Stalin before being abolished by Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's successor, in 1960.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago shone a light on life inside the Soviet prison system. It estimated that around 50 million people had gone through the labour camps between 1918 and 1956.
Underground copies of the book by the former political prisoner and Nobel prize winner were disseminated in the USSR from the late 1960s onwards.
Memorial, my great-grandfather and I
Sasha Lavut, 15, is one of the youngest Memorial volunteers. He started two years ago, handing out flyers and candles in the street at the annual commemoration for victims of the Soviet repressions. Later he began to look after the group's Tik Tok account and other social media platforms.
Sasha is named after his great grandfather, Alexander Lavut, a former political prisoner and one of the editors of A chronicle of Current Events, a prominent Soviet underground publication, which detailed human rights abuses in the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s.
Alexander spent seven years in prison and then in exile for his activism, before joining Memorial.
"If we haven't achieved what he was fighting for - respect for human rights in Russia - then we have to keep going with what was started under far more difficult circumstances," says his great grandson. "I see Memorial as a part of my great grandfather and therefore a part of me."
'The best job I ever had'
Roman Petrishchev, 29, who had dreamed of working in a human rights group since university, joined Memorial in 2020 as a member of staff and calls it "a dream job".
He was distraught to learn the organisation would have to close.
His colleague Natasha Sekretareva, also 29, has been at Memorial since February and feels the same: "It's the best job I've ever had, with the best people. I have finally found my community."
Both Roman and Natasha work for the human rights arm of the organisation, which means that they don't research past repressions but help those it describes as Russia's current political prisoners.
Natasha looks after the cases Memorial takes to the European Court of Human Rights.
Patriotic narrative
Amnesty International's Marie Struthers described the decision to shut down Memorial as "a grave insult to victims of the Gulag".
"Memorial was created at the time of Perestroika when it seemed that the Soviet Union would never return, the arrests would never return," Zoya Svetova, a human rights activist and publicist, told BBC Russian. "But now there is a feeling that all these things might come back into our life."
History and nostalgia play a key part in Vladimir Putin's presidency. In December he lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of what he described as "historical Russia".
"What had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost," he said.
Russia's role in World War Two has been recently included in the country's constitution and "spreading falsehoods about the activities of the USSR" in the war can be punished with fines or even imprisonment.
Yet, repressions of the Soviet era, while not openly condoned, have not been officially examined.
Memorial's supporters say that the organisation has been uncovering parts of Russian history which current authorities don't want exposed as they don't fit into the patriotic narrative.
"Those who have studied the past of their families and have seen the Soviet archives, are likely to continue to be resistant to the myths of the 'lost Soviet paradise'," says lawyer Daniil Petrov.
He believes the work of Memorial has provided "an inoculation against propaganda".
Olga is one of those who came to support Memorial during the final court hearing and was heartbroken to find out that it would have to close.
"My grandfather was executed in 1937. I was never able to find out exactly what he was accused of. Memorial would have been the only place which could have helped me. Now that hope is gone."
Memorial: Russia’s civil rights group uncovering an uncomfortable past. BBC, January 3, 2022.
The
Solovetsky Islands in northern Russia’s White Sea have played a unique role in
the country’s history. Almost 600 years ago its fortified monastery was founded
and quickly became a stronghold of the Russian Orthodox Church. Following the
Bolshevik victory after the 1917 revolution, the monastery was closed down and
many of its buildings were turned into a forced labour camp, a prototype of
Stalin’s Gulag system. More than one million prisoners died in this camp, said
by historians to have the hardest regime of all.
Twenty nine years ago I made the first of several visits to the Solovetsky Islands to witness the re-opening of the monastery. The walk through the dark deserted rooms, many still festooned with shackles, sent shivers down my spine, even though it was peak summer and the venomous mosquitoes, whose bites literally killed tethered and naked prisoners all those years before, were using my follically-challenged head as a landing strip. In winter the temperatures hover around -20 degrees C, (the lowest recorded is -36 degrees C). Solovetsky prisoners who weren’t bitten to death in the summer, froze to death in winter.
With so much suffering and death in the gulags, it’s no wonder that those Russians who wanted to keep the memory of the victims alive, chose to transport a huge granite boulder from the Solovetsky islands to Moscow, where it is set in the middle of Lubyanka Square, opposite the infamous KGB (now FSB) building. The Solovetsky stone was one of the first and perhaps the most important monument of its kind in the former Soviet Union. The inscription at the foot of the pedestal reads: “This stone is delivered by the ‘Memorial’ members from the Solovetsky Camp and established in memory of the victims of the totalitarian regime”. Some wanted to use the word “Stalinist”, as the dictator was responsible directly or indirectly for the deaths of some 20 million victims.
Twenty nine years ago I made the first of several visits to the Solovetsky Islands to witness the re-opening of the monastery. The walk through the dark deserted rooms, many still festooned with shackles, sent shivers down my spine, even though it was peak summer and the venomous mosquitoes, whose bites literally killed tethered and naked prisoners all those years before, were using my follically-challenged head as a landing strip. In winter the temperatures hover around -20 degrees C, (the lowest recorded is -36 degrees C). Solovetsky prisoners who weren’t bitten to death in the summer, froze to death in winter.
With so much suffering and death in the gulags, it’s no wonder that those Russians who wanted to keep the memory of the victims alive, chose to transport a huge granite boulder from the Solovetsky islands to Moscow, where it is set in the middle of Lubyanka Square, opposite the infamous KGB (now FSB) building. The Solovetsky stone was one of the first and perhaps the most important monument of its kind in the former Soviet Union. The inscription at the foot of the pedestal reads: “This stone is delivered by the ‘Memorial’ members from the Solovetsky Camp and established in memory of the victims of the totalitarian regime”. Some wanted to use the word “Stalinist”, as the dictator was responsible directly or indirectly for the deaths of some 20 million victims.
Memorial is Russia’s oldest civil rights group and was established in the late 1980s by dissidents, including the famous physicist Andrei Sakharov. It has spent decades cataloguing atrocities committed in the Soviet Union, building up a huge archive of Soviet-era crimes and campaigning tirelessly for human rights in Russia. This activity has so annoyed President Putin that two weeks ago, prosecutors were instructed to ask the Kremlin-controlled courts to dissolve Memorial for allegedly violating Russia’s controversial law on “foreign agents”. This comes in a year that has seen an unprecedented crackdown on Putin’s opponents, including the jailing of chief Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny and the banning of his organisation as “foreign agents”.
Russia’s “foreign agent” law is Putin’s “catch-all” law designed to curtail any criticism of the Kremlin. It was introduced in July 2012 to cover “any direct or indirect interference in our internal affairs, any form of pressure on Russia”, according to the speech made by Putin to the FSB in 2013. This means that any opposition group giving Vladimir Putin a sleepless night is slapped with a “foreign-agent” order by the courts, which makes the problem go away; job done. Laden with Soviet-era connotations of treachery and espionage, the “foreign-agent” label has been used against a wide range of rights-groups and independent media in recent years.
But why is President Putin so paranoid about Memorial?
Putin wants to control the historical narrative in Russia, which is perhaps why his boyhood contemporary from Leningrad, Sergei Naryshkin, is not only head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, but also the head of the Russian Historical Society. The Kremlin aims to legitimise its authoritarian practices by imbuing the power of the state with an almost sacred quality. Even personal memories must be interpreted to fit a prearranged discourse, giving the state full control of Russian history.
Take for example the infamous Katyn massacre, when in 1940 some 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals were executed by the Soviet secret police. Until 1990, the Soviet Union claimed that it was the Nazis who carried out the butchery, but in that year, Boris Yeltsin released documents showing that it was indeed carried out as directed by Joseph Stalin. Articles on a state-run news agency website are now rehashing the falsified Stalinist version of the event, once again suggesting that the Poles were massacred by the Germans.
Putin’s regime has not openly exonerated Joseph Stalin of his crimes, but neither has it opposed the creeping rehabilitation of Stalin by many. The clear plan is to gradually remove from the public gaze any reference to the mass murders carried out by the person whom many at the time considered powerful but deranged, and focus on the war hero—Stalin, the strongman who heroically saved the nation. And it’s working. In just one year, according to the latest polling by the Levada Centre, the public’s “respect” for Stalin increased from 29% to 41%. The number of those who believe that Stalin played a positive role in the country has grown consistently to 70% in 2019, while only 19% of respondents had a negative opinion.
Vladimir Putin has thrived on his image of a strong leader. People remember the disastrous period following the fall of the Soviet Union 30 years ago; Boris Yeltsin appeared weak and the living standards fell dramatically as his regime pursued a post-communist failed economic “shock treatment”. As Russian friends said to me in Moscow while their world collapsed: “plenty of shock, but no treatment”. The perception quickly arose that only a strong leader could solve Russia’s problems. A poll last year underpinned this view when 45% of respondents even supported the idea of the concentration of power in the hands of a single person. Many Russians have set aside the terror of the Stalin period, personifying him as the model of order and Vladimir Putin has built on this image to create mutually reinforcing popularity ratings. When Putin behaves in a more authoritarian manner, Stalin becomes more popular. A more popular Stalin elevates the popularity of Putin, or so the Kremlin’s theory goes. Any organisation or person who interrupts this “virtuous cycle”, such as Memorial, must be removed.
Over the past decade, Memorial has survived Russia’s reactionary turn under Vladimir Putin, continuing to popularise its research into the Stalin-era atrocities as it built a database of more than 3 million of his victims. The passive measures against Memorial by the Putin regime, such as blocking primary documents from the Stalin era, have had limited success and they now appear to be turning to the nuclear option of destroying Memorial itself. “We were enthusiasts who wanted to know more about history, tell people about their history”, said historian and researcher at Memorial, Nikita Petrov. “When Russia chose to take a democratic, legal path forward, I couldn’t in my darkest dreams have imagined that everything would eventually start going into reverse. Probably I was naive then.”
Another historian, Yuri Dmitriev, who had dedicated himself to documenting Stalin’s 1937-38 Great Terror by unearthing mass graves and chronicling state repression in Russia’s north-western Karelia region, was found guilty of paedophilia last year and sentenced to a 13-year jail term in a high security penal colony. “Nonsense” said his supporters, “the outrageous charges were fabricated simply to punish him for his work with Memorial”.
UN officials, the Council of Europe, international rights groups and Western governments have all warned against Memorial being disbanded. Russia’s two surviving Nobel Peace Prize winners, the last Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and Novaya Gazeta newspaper editor, Dmitry Muratov, have urged prosecutors to drop their claims. The two said in a joint statement that Memorial was aimed not only at preserving the memory of Soviet-era repression, but at “preventing this from happening now and in the future”.
Many Russians would say that under Vladimir Putin, it already has.
Vladimir Putin is whitewashing Russia’s dark past. By John Dobson. The Sunday Guardian, December 11, 2021.
