The document with which the Russian rulers want to end the civil society appraisal of the crimes of the Soviet regime and the work of the most important human rights organization in the country has twelve pages.

Memorial, Russia's oldest non-governmental organization, is to be disbanded, along with its numerous subgroups, according to an application made by the General Prosecutor's Office on Thursday.

In the past few weeks Moscow has declared dozens of journalists, lawyers and election observers "foreign agents", as has independent media and civil rights groups.

Now, with the "liquidation" of Memorial, civil society is to be beheaded, as it were.

Friedrich Schmidt

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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The motion, on which the Supreme Court is due to rule on November 25, is based ostensibly on violations of the rules against "foreign agents". Memorial's umbrella organization dealing with history and education projects was given this stigma in 2016, the human rights center of the organization, which currently has 420 people on its lists of political and religious prisoners in Russia, as early as 2014. In brittle official Russian, the application leads twenty cases between the end of 2019 and At the end of 2020, Memorial did not add the addition of a “foreign agent” to various “materials”. The chain of such judgments does not end. The prosecutors apparently found no other allegations. In return, they claim that Memorial "systematically" hides the "agent" status,and conjure up "interests of national security" as well as a "fulfillment of fair standards of morality". Memorial is even said to have violated the constitution, as well as the requirement to “protect children from information that negatively affects their moral and spiritual development”.

Memorial stands in the way of a monopoly of history

This leads to the core of what the Regime Memorial actually accuses: The organization that emerged at the end of the 1980s in the struggle for a memorial for the victims of Soviet terror stands in the way of the state's monopoly on history, which has been claimed ever more aggressively in recent years.

President Vladimir Putin is the chief historian, and the secret services see themselves as the proud heirs of the NKVD and KGB.

The victims of the state terrorism known as “repression” may be remembered, but Putin himself opened a memorial for them in the center of Moscow four years ago;

but the murderers should not be criticized, remain undetected.

Arsenij Roginsky, who headed Memorial from 1998, described to the FAZ two and a half years before his death at the end of 2017 how Putin was using “Stalinist stereotypes” to legitimize his rule: “We are the best and the fairest,” the historian summed up Message, “and have only done good to the people around us. But enemies abroad and at home want to harm us and bring us to our knees. ”State terror, to which millions of its own citizens fell victim, does not fit into this black and white conception: the Soviet Union as a state that defeated absolute evil in 1945 , could not act terrorist.

Instead, anyone who criticizes the Russian state and its leadership is considered evil.

Just as Memorial sees the commitment to human rights as an imperative to remember, the regime sees criticism of torture in the penal system or the invasion of Ukraine as a hostile act.

Memorial becomes the target of state propaganda that ties in with Stalin's concept of the “enemy of the people”.

In October, young men stormed Memorial Moscow headquarters to prevent a film about the Holodomor from being shown in Ukraine;

TV propagandists went with them, the police let the men go and instead detained Memorial guests and staff for hours.

A photo was taken that many saw as a symbol: a pair of handcuffs that the police used to lock the double doors to Memorial.

Physical attacks are a tradition

The attacks have a tradition. In 2016, “activists” poured green liquid onto the face of the writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya when she went to the award ceremony for “Man in History”. In the memorial competition that has been taking place since 1999 and is sponsored by German foundations, schoolchildren from many parts of Russia explore the fate of their surroundings.

The fact that they receive such a differentiated view of history displeases powerful circles. Memorial representative in northwestern Karelia, Yuriy Dmitriev, discovered mass graves in which victims of Stalin's shootings were buried. Now the dead are being reinterpreted for propaganda purposes as victims of Finnish occupation soldiers in World War II, while Dmitrijew is imprisoned through flimsy child abuse proceedings and is to be deprived of his good reputation. In Chechnya, the regime eliminated the local memorial representative, Oyub Titiev, with drug allegations; he had to leave home after his release from custody.

Memorial was warned, but giving up was never an option.

Now the organization announced that the law on "foreign agents" had been used from the beginning to "settle accounts with independent organizations".

There is no legal basis for the dissolution;

his a "political decision".

In an analogous process, the organization “For Human Rights” was dissolved in 2019;

its founder, Lev Ponomarev (who now also has to call himself an "agent") wrote that the memorial was disappearing, testifying to "profound moral decline".

Political scientist Kirill Rogow, on the other hand, emphasized that Memorial survived its founders and will also survive its persecutors, due to the wealth of experience of the dissidents against the totalitarian dictatorship: "Memorial will always exist."