Since its ban in Russia at the end of 2021, the oldest and most famous Russian NGO, Memorial, continues its work of memory. Its objective, for thirty years, has been clear: to document the crimes of the Soviet state and help its victims, to enable Russia to face its past and put an end to the national propaganda narrative dear to Vladimir Putin.

In a room of the Paris City Hall, lawyers and historians from Russia, Moldova, Ukraine and Lithuania tackled a dizzying question on Friday, April 21: how did the denial of history in Russia lead to the war in Ukraine?

"The authorities have a feeling of total impunity"

"The crimes of the Soviet regime have not been condemned in Russia, and the authorities have a feeling of total impunity," said Emilia Koustova, director of Slavic studies at the University of Strasbourg and a member of the France Memorial. This is what the war and the current situation are from: the Russian regime is a continuation of the Soviet regime, its techniques have remained the same."

>>Watch: View from Russia: Propaganda against 'traitors' and 'spies' intensifies amid political trials

Because unlike what happened in Moldova, Lithuania or Ukraine, the work begun by Memorial alongside the "children of the Gulag", these sons and daughters of deportees of the Stalinist era, is blocked by the Russian authorities, in the process of rehabilitating Stalin.

Access to the archives was locked as soon as Vladimir Putin came to power, and memorial laws have been enacted in recent years to prevent the work of historians. But Memorial does not give up: Sergei Prudhovsky, passing through France, Friday, continues to fight in Russia. The historian has filed 13 complaints with Russian courts to obtain access to classified secret service documents.

Instrumentalization of History

This quest for truth is crucial in Russia, in the face of the authorities' instrumentalization of the history of the Soviet Union and World War II to justify their attack on Ukraine.

"The Russian authorities are seeking to revise Soviet history by evading the millions of victims, to celebrate a victorious USSR in the Second World War," sums up Ilya Nuzov, Director of FIDH's Eastern Europe and Central Asia Programme. By fighting the work of historians, Putin's regime is conflating the war against Ukraine with Soviet resistance against the Nazis."

Following in the footsteps of the communist regime, Vladimir Putin does not hesitate to recycle some of the Soviet techniques. Moldovan lawyer Alexandru Postica compares the methods used by the Russian army during the Butcha massacre in March 2022 to those of the Red Army in Moldova. In the village of Fântâna Albă, 2,000 to 4,000 people were executed by the NKVD (ex-KGB) in April 1941.

Similarly, the conviction of Alexei Navalny in March 2022 for "fraud" and those of Belarusian activists, tried for "embezzlement", evoke the many political prisoners sentenced in Soviet times on spurious grounds of common law.

Repression unmatched since Stalin

A continuity that Memorial strives to document, while the pressure exerted on the Russian population has reached a scale not seen since the end of the Second World War. The terror that reigns in Russia, where everyone is afraid to speak out and be denounced, as in the Soviet period, explains the current passivity in the face of war, says Natalia Morozova, a lawyer at Memorial who has been a refugee in France for a year.

"Since 2012," she points out, "laws have gradually come to 'tighten the screws' on the population, and the terror of the 1930s reigns again in the country. You can't ask everyone to be a hero..."

Because the "heroes" in Russia have a lot to do in prison. Journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to twenty-five years in detention last week, while opponent Ilya Yashin was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison... A painful reminder that the past remains, in Russia, of a burning topicality.

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