This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/29/world/europe/russia-memorial-human-rights-center.html

The article has changed 6 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 2 Version 3
Russian Court Orders 2nd Ban of a Major Human Rights Group in 2 Days As the Kremlin Revises History, a Human Rights Champion Becomes a Casualty
(about 5 hours later)
MOSCOW — A Moscow court ordered the closure of one of the country’s most prominent human rights groups on Wednesday, a day after its parent organization was also shut down in verdicts that, for many Russians, served as a painful coda to a year marked by the erosion of civil rights and freedom of expression. MOSCOW — In 1990, the year before she died, Zipporah Rosenblatt Kahana spoke publicly for the first time about her imprisonment in Russian labor camps 50 years earlier. She did hard labor and worked as a seamstress, but the conditions were so severe that she lost her left eye. Her husband was executed as an enemy of the state. Her “crime” was being married to him.
The ruling by Moscow’s City Court will close the Memorial Human Rights Center, which keeps a tally of political prisoners. On Tuesday the country’s Supreme Court ordered the shuttering of Memorial International, which was founded in 1989 by Soviet dissidents to preserve memories of Soviet repression. Her account came in testimony to Memorial International, then a recently-established human rights organization chronicling political repression in the Soviet Union.
Together, the shutdowns reflected President Vladimir V. Putin’s determination to control the narrative of some of the most painful and repressive chapters in Russian history and keep dissidents at bay. Since January, the Kremlin has accelerated a campaign to stifle dissent, clamping down on independent media, religious groups and political opponents. “For a long time after her release, she felt that this was some kind of dark side of her past that no one needs to know,” said her great-grandson, Nikolai Dykhne. Memorial’s work collecting information about the labor camps, or gulag system, gave her “the courage to finally tell her story completely,” he said.
Memorial’s list of political prisoners now stands at 435 names — twice as many as the government acknowledged in the late Soviet period. Prosecutors accused the human rights group of justifying “international terrorist and extremist organizations” by including on its list imprisoned members of religious groups such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Memorial grew into the country’s most prominent human rights organization and an emblem of a fledgling democratic movement in post-Soviet Russia. But today, its archive of the traumatic events and victims of persecution make the Kremlin uncomfortable. The country’s Supreme Court issued a ruling Tuesday to shut down Memorial International, the parent organization, and on Wednesday it also ordered Memorial’s Human Rights Center to close.
That list includes Aleksei A. Navalny, a prominent opposition leader, who was poisoned with what Western intelligence agencies believe is the Russian-made nerve agent Novichok. Memorial has denounced both verdicts as political and vowed to appeal and find legal avenues to continue its work with its 60 affiliate organizations across the country.
Prosecutors said the group promoted “biased materials on human rights topics” that were used to discredit “the structure of the Russian Federation.” They said members of the organization had “participated in all protest movements,” and “supported all protests aimed at destabilizing the country,” including Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. The actions taken against Memorial, critics say, is emblematic of the way President Vladimir V. Putin has tried to whitewash Russia’s Soviet history and reframe the modern image of those decades — in a manner similar to a push by President Xi Jinping of China to minimize the traumatic parts of his country’s communist history, like famine and political purges.
Prosecutors also accused the group of failing to comply with a 2012 “foreign agent” law, the same reason the Supreme Court gave on Tuesday in closing down Memorial International. The law requires designated organizations to meet onerous financial reporting rules and to add a disclaimer to all public communication warning that it was produced by a “foreign agent.” The legal rulings this week provoked outrage among activists and dissents, and condemnation from the United States and the European Union.
The human rights center was named a “foreign agent” in 2013, shortly after the law came into effect, while Memorial International, its parent group, was designated as such in 2016. But the most poignant reactions came from Russians, like Mr. Dykhne, whose families have been touched by Memorial’s work.
The targeting of the organization’s historical archive and human rights center at the same time was proof that “the goals are political,” according to Ilya Novikov, a lawyer for Memorial. Co-founded by Andrei D. Sakharov, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and registered by former President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, another winner of that prize, Memorial grew out of a popular movement to erect a monument to commemorate victims of Joseph Stalin’s grinding machine of terror. It quickly expanded beyond its initial cause.
“The state is not comfortable with how the human rights center assesses its activities,” he said during the proceedings. In 1989, with candles in their hands, members of Memorial and their supporters surrounded the K.G.B. headquarters in central Moscow, a demonstration that would have been unthinkable just several years earlier. It seemed like a sign that times were changing.
Grigory Vaypan, a lawyer for Memorial, said this week’s proceedings were reminiscent of absurd Soviet show trials against dissidents. He mentioned the 1975 case against Sergei A. Kovalev, who in 1969 helped set up the Action Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the U.S.S.R. For his human rights work, Mr. Kovalev served seven years in strict prisons and then spent three years in “internal exile” in the Soviet Far East. The verdicts this week proved that the changes are not irrevocable, said Svetlana Gannushkina, a Memorial board member and one of Russia’s most renowned human rights defenders, who stood in that chain of protesters.
“We have already gone through this,” he said. “Today’s accusation is exactly the same as the accusations against Soviet dissidents.” Ms. Gannushkina remembered the security operatives who hid in the giant fortresslike building on Lyubyanka Square. “They didn’t feel comfortable at the time,” she recalled. “But today, they feel very comfortable, they are in power.”
Tuesday’s verdict against Memorial International was criticized by both the U.S. secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, and the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles. Under Memorial’s auspices, Ms. Gannushkina established a program to help migrants, refugees and internally-displaced people. Today, she works with a team of 55 lawyers across Russia who help up to 5,000 people every year. Some had remained stateless for up to 20 years, until Memorial’s lawyers helped them, she said.
“The people of Russia — and the memory of the millions who suffered from Soviet-era repression — deserve better,” said Mr. Blinken in a statement. “We don’t do anything but make sure the state observes its laws,” said Ms. Gannushkina, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.
In Moscow, the chairman of the security committee in the Lower House of Parliament welcomed the decision and denounced Western criticism. Apart from the migration program, Memorial representatives have worked in all major conflict zones of the former Soviet Union and Russia. It was the last independent human rights organization to leave Chechnya. It is one of the few organizations working actively in Central Asia.
“Washington and Brussels are defending precisely the activities of Memorial and its numerous structures that can be used against Russia,” the committee chairman, Vasily Piskarev, told reporters. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, Memorial has helped install monuments to victims of Stalinist crimes. The Moscow monument, a boulder brought from one of the first Soviet prison camps, stands in front of the K.G.B. headquarters. Every year at the end of October thousands of people stand in line at a microphone to read the names of victims of political persecution.
“We are again being told what to do and how,” he said. “Russia is open to an equal dialogue, but does not accept dictates from abroad and attempts to impose on us its truth and a distorted view of the events of the past and present.” Today, Memorial comprises over 50 organizations in Russia, six in Ukraine as well as chapters in Germany, France, Italy and other countries, engaged in historical research and human rights work.
Memorial has accepted money from foreign donors but its employees deny any accusations that they serve interests of foreign powers. Outside the courtroom on Wednesday, several dozen people protested against the ruling, yelling “Shame!” Recently, younger generations of Russians have become interested in Memorial’s work. For Ksenia Kazantseva, 40, Memorial helped her discover what her great-grandfather looked like.
Memorial plans to appeal both verdicts, and to find legal ways to continue its human rights work and archive preservation through its 60 affiliate organizations across Russia. The great-grandfather, Mikhail N. Malama, was a former aide to Czar Nicholas II, she said. He was arrested in 1937 and charged with a conspiracy to commit a terrorist act.
“We may be closed,” Mr. Cherkasov said, but added that Russians’ interest in human rights would not go away. What happened to him next had been a family mystery for decades. In 2019, however, Ms. Kazantseva discovered his name in Memorial’s database — which contains more than three million files. Memorial representatives helped her submit a request with the archives, which eventually sent her a package. It contained Mr. Malama’s picture. For the first time, Ms. Kazantseva could see his face.
“Memorial is not an organization or a public movement,” Memorial International said in a statement on Tuesday. “Memorial is Russian citizens’ aspiration to know the truth about the plight of millions of people. No one can shut down that aspiration.” “It was a very special feeling to see a person for the first time and realize that he looks like your relative,” said Ms. Kazantseva, a freelance composer.
Ivan Nechepurenko and Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.
“Memorial preserves memory of what happened in our country, if you erase it, then it can all get rewritten,” said Ms. Kazantseva.
While the government acknowledges the trauma of the Stalin era, it is also attempting to spur patriotism among Russians. The core element of that is celebrating Russia’s contributions to World War II and the defeat of the Nazis, which laid the foundations of the Soviet Union as a global powerhouse.
Some Russians find Stalin’s iron-fisted rule appealing in a world full of chaos and uncertainty. A 2019 poll conducted by the independent Levada Center, 70 percent of those surveyed believed Stalin played an “entirely” or “mostly positive” role in Russian history, the highest since Levada started asking the question in 2003.
Stalin was the Soviet Union’s leader at the time, which is why, in the eyes of the Kremlin, his image should not be completely tarnished, said Aleksandr Baunov, editor in chief of the Carnegie Moscow Center’s website.
Mr. Baunov drew a comparison between the shuttering of Memorial and the actions of China’s Communist Party as it rewrites its history under Mr. Xi.
“This is a real shift toward a Chinese attitude to history,” he said, describing the approach as ‘Yes, there were individual mistakes, there were victims, including unjustified sacrifices, but all that was for the greatness of the country’,” Mr. Baunov said.
Mr. Xi has used the Soviet Union as a cautionary tale for China, saying it collapsed because its leaders had been unable to quash “historical nihilism,” referring to critical accounts of political persecution, or attempts to chronicle government mistakes that led citizens to lose faith in communism.
Mr. Dykhne, who at age 24 does not remember any Russian leader besides Mr. Putin, said the Gulag system was never discussed at his school in Moscow. He said what he learned about the Soviet dissident movement and his family’s history came from his elders.
In November, after prosecutors announced their investigation into Memorial, he donated his great-grandmother’s complete personal archive to the organization, and trusts they will somehow find a way to preserve it.
Mr. Dykhne, who works as a sculptor, said her experience weighs on him as he assesses events in Russia today. He said his family history prevented him from trusting Russian authorities.
“A lot of people are losing hope now for some kind of normal future in this country,” he said.
But he also said the brutality of the Soviet state made him painfully aware of the consequences of dissent. He mentioned the brutal crackdown on protesters in January this year after the dissident Aleksei A. Navalny returned from Germany, where he was recovering from what doctors said was poisoning by a Russian-made nerve agent, and was later sent to a penal colony. The ensuing protests were large-scale and spread across the country, but they were violently suppressed, with thousands arrested.
“If a year ago someone may have believed in all sorts of street protests, now the authorities have already shown us what that leads to,’’ he said. “I do not see any solution.”
“They are trying to erase our memory,” he said. “There is a feeling that they are trying to somehow paint over what happened then, so that we cannot compare it with what is happening now.”
Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.