It was an emblem of Russian memory.

The Russian NGO Memorial, co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has shed light for three decades on the Stalinist purges, then the repressions in contemporary Russia of Vladimir Putin, before being itself a victim.

Last winter, the Russian justice had pronounced the dissolution of Memorial for violations of a controversial law on "foreign agents", a decision which had shocked in the West as in Russia and sparked an avalanche of convictions.

The dissolution of this pillar of Russian civil society, symbol of the democratization of the 1990s after the collapse of the USSR, had preceded the offensive in Ukraine by a few weeks.

Since then, the Kremlin has further stepped up the repression of voices denouncing its military campaign, with thousands of fines and heavy prison sentences.

Founded in 1989, Memorial never ceased before its dissolution to challenge the Kremlin, attracting the enmity of many officials and reprisals going as far as assassination.

From Stalinist crimes to abuses in Chechnya, the organization, created by Soviet dissidents including the Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, was authoritative through its rigorous investigations, in particular into the abuses of Russian paramilitaries in Syria.

At the same time, Memorial compiled a list of political prisoners, provided assistance to them, as well as to migrants and sexual minorities.

Great prestige in Europe

It is above all for its work in Chechnya, a Russian republic in the Caucasus, the scene of two wars, that the NGO became known in the West, where it enjoyed great prestige, having received the Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament in 2009. During the Chechen conflicts of the 1990s and 2000s, Memorial staff were on the ground, documenting the abuses of Russian soldiers and their local auxiliaries.

"Power has always hated that," recalled last November to AFP historian Irina Chtcherbakova, one of the founders of the organization.



In 2009, the head of the NGO in Chechnya, Natalia Estemirova, was kidnapped in broad daylight and shot in the head in Grozny.

Implicated in this assassination, the authoritarian Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, who today is one of the most zealous supporters of the attack on the Kremlin in Ukraine, had in return called the members of the Memorial "enemies People ".

In 2018, a new case prompted the NGO to withdraw from Chechnya: the conviction of its local manager Oïoub Titiev in a drug case denounced as a set-up.

The obsession with memory

According to its founders, Memorial had begun its activities long before its official creation in 1989. Its objective was then to give a name and to pay homage to the millions of forgotten victims of Soviet repressions and the Gulag.

In the 1960s and 1970s, activists began gathering information about these crimes clandestinely, and then out in the open after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika.

"Memorial is the heir of a movement, then of an organization which has never ceased to cry out loud and clear that it was very dangerous for the memory of the dictatorship to disappear from the collective consciousness", summarized the historian Irina Shcherbakova.

With the rise to power of Vladimir Putin in 2000, this task had proved increasingly difficult, because the Kremlin, defending a historical interpretation exalting Russian power, minimizes Soviet crimes.

Pressures

During the NGO's dissolution trial, prosecutor Alexei Jafiarov accused Memorial of "creating a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state" and of seeking to "rehabilitate Nazi criminals".

Memorial denounced other forms of pressure to silence the NGO.

One of its historians working on the Stalinist purges in Karelia (north-west), Yuri Dmitriev, was thus sentenced last December to 15 years in prison in a case of “sexual violence”.

In early April, a month after the start of the Russian attack in Ukraine, Oleg Orlov, one of the historic leaders of Memorial, admitted to AFP that he had not "lived a darker period" in his life.

“What is happening now is not comparable to what could have happened before (…) a country which had left the totalitarian system is returning to it”, had asserted the one who had started to militate in the 1980s, by broadcasting leaflets against the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

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