Nobel Peace Prize 2022: The perpetrator of Memorial, Russia’s flagship NGO that Putin disbanded

The iconic non-governmental organization her of Russia, Memorial shed light for three decades first on the Stalinist persecutions and then on Mrsstopping the Vladimir Putin period, among whose victims she is now herself. Today he was honored with the Award Nobel Peace Prize 2022together with the imprisoned Belarusian dissident Ales Bialiatsky and the Ukrainian organization Center for Civil Liberties.

Last winter, the Russian judiciary decided to dissolve the Memorial organization for violating the “foreign agents” law, one of the tools the Putin regime uses against its critics.

The dismantling of the pillar of Russian civil society, a symbol of the brief period of democratization in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, preceded by a few weeks the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Since then, the Kremlin has stepped up its crackdown on any voice denouncing the Russian offensivewith thousands in fines and heavy prison sentences.

The Memorial organization was founded in 1989 by Soviet dissidents, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Zakharov. He did not stop until its dissolution to denounce the Kremlin, causing the displeasure of the Russian nomenclature and reprisals that reached the point of assassination.

From Stalinist crimes to Chechnya and Russian paramilitary activity in Syria, the organization imposed itself with its thorough investigations. Piin addition, Memorial compiled lists of political prisoners and offered assistance to them, as well as to immigrants and sexual minorities.

“enemy of the people”

The organization became best known in the West for its work in Chechnya, the republic of the Caucasus, theater of two Russian wars and endless atrocities. The organization specifically targeted the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and his men who are accused of extrajudicial executions, torture, kidnappings.

Kadyrov is still a staunch supporter of Putin and his war in Ukrainehe treated the members of the organization as “enemies of the people”.

In 2009, Memorial’s representative in Chechnya, Natalya Estemirova, was kidnapped and murdered in Grozny with a single bullet to the head. The crime went unpunished.

In 2018, a new case forced the organization to withdraw from Chechnya: the conviction of its local executive, Oyub Titiyev, on a fake drug case.

Most recently, in the fall of 2020, one of the Memorial’s historians, Yuri Dmitriev, was sentenced to 13 years in prison in a “sexual assault” case. These were trumped-up charges to damage his investigations into the Stalinist persecutions.

The Memorial organization was awarded the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize in 2009.

The persistence of memory

The Memorial organization had started its activities long before its official establishment in 1989. Its aim was to give name and honor to the millions of forgotten victims of Soviet persecutions and the Gulag.

In the 1960s and 1970s, members of the organization had already begun to covertly gather evidence of Soviet crimes and then later openly during Mikhail Gorbachev’s Petrestroika.

“Memorial is the heir of a movement and then an organization that did not stop shouting that the disappearance of the memory of the dictatorship from the collective memory is very dangerous” says the historian Irina Cherbakova.

With Putin coming to power in 2000, the organization’s mission became more difficult because the Kremlin, defending a “historical interpretation” that excludes Russian power, downplays the crimes of the Soviet era.

At the beginning of April, a month before the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Oleg Orlov, one of the historical figures of the Memorial, confessed that “he has not lived in a darker period in his life.”

“What is happening today is not comparable to what has happened in the past (…) a country that came out of the totalitarian system is coming back,” says Oleg Orlov, who began his activism in the 1980s by distributing leaflets against the Soviet war in Afghanistan.