No sooner had the decision to dissolve Memorial International been announced than dozens of Russians chanted "Shame, shame" in front of the Supreme Court in central Moscow.

The young among them had not yet been born when the human rights organization began work on a memorial for the victims of Soviet state terror in the late 1980s.

Now, according to the will of the court, which is generally understood to express the will of the Kremlin, they should do without Russia's oldest and most important human rights organization.

Friedrich Schmidt

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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The judge Alla Nazarova formally appealed to the General Prosecutor's office.

This was collected last month and relates to “systematic” violations of the “Foreign Agents” Act, which stipulates marking obligations.

Memorial had rejected the law from the start, but, as a precaution, had given his publications the defamatory stigma linked to Soviet dictator Stalin's image of the "enemy of the people".

Nevertheless, the organization was punished for not making self-accusations in social networks and databases, about the obligation to mark them until then nothing had been said.

The organization paid the fines, a total of more than 72,000 euros, and collected donations for it. But the General Prosecutor's Office revalued the old allegations of violations of the constitution and even saw the “moral and intellectual development” of children at risk. President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, commented on the goings-on through the formalistic glasses that are the glue of the Russian system of rule. It negates the de facto abolition of the separation of powers in favor of the nomenklatura: Memorial had "had problems with observing the norms of Russian legislation for a long time".

According to the same logic, Putin's spokesman recently saw no one in Russia persecuted for their political beliefs, as there was no corresponding criminal offense. In contrast, the Memorial Human Rights Center, whose liquidation is to be decided in parallel this Wednesday, currently has more than 430 prisoners. These are formally imprisoned in Russia for a variety of pretended reasons, but actually because of their political or religious convictions.

On the one hand, the course of the proceedings against Memorial shows that the power apparatus is not doing well with the trust it has in its own trials. The decisions will be announced when the public's attention is drawn to the holidays that are imminent for Russia and the indignant western countries “between the years” dawning. The judgments against Putin's opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2010 and against the opposition politician Alexej Navalnyj and his brother Oleg in 2014 were also scheduled.

On the other hand, the allegations that were brought against Memorial in the trial go far beyond the rather brittle allegations in the application for "liquidation" (the Russian expression). The representative of the Prosecutor General, Alexei Shafyarov, now spoke in his dissolution plea that Memorial was founded to “remember victims”, but now “instead of remembering the glorious past, it forces one to repent of the Soviet past”.

This depicts attempts by the leadership under Putin to portray Soviet and Russian history as a single chain of victories, among which the magnitude of the 1945 victory has to outshine the dark sides of its own history.

Also those of the terror under Stalin with hundreds of thousands shot and millions deported or sent to the prison camp system on fabricated charges.