Nobel Peace Prize Winners Share a Past Shadowed by Russian Abuses

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/world/europe/nobel-peace-prize-memorial-russia.html

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The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to human rights advocates in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus whose campaigns for democracy, civil liberties and accountability for crimes of the past represent a sharp challenge to the aggression and repression unleashed by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the annual prize to Memorial, the Russian organization shuttered by the Kremlin last year that has documented human rights abuses past and present; to the Center for Civil Liberties, a Ukrainian pro-democracy group; and to Ales Bialiatski, an imprisoned human rights defender in Belarus.

That the prize went to representatives of all three countries highlighted the long shadow of their shared Soviet past — one that Mr. Putin and his Belarusian ally, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, are striving to revive while Ukrainians die fighting a Russian invasion that is now in its eighth month.

To some Ukrainians, the Nobel Committee’s decision to award the prize to people from all three countries in the midst of their war with Russia sent the wrong message by reminding the world of that shared past as they try to break free from Russian dominance.

Others saw the prize as a message of defiance across borders and a recognition of the individuals across Eastern Europe who are fighting an authoritarianism that has bred war.

“We have a mutual enemy right now,” Aleksandr Cherkasov, the chairman of the Memorial Human Rights Center before it was shut down, said in a phone interview. “If you will, it is war; regimes that have become sources of war; and regimes that have become sources of repression.”

Memorial, the best known internationally of the three laureates, emerged as Russia’s historical conscience with the fall of the Soviet Union, documenting the crimes of Stalin’s secret police and of the K.G.B. that many in the country’s elite tried to continue to cover up.

Amid Mr. Putin’s increasing repression, Memorial also came to focus on present-day abuses; in 2009, one of its researchers, Natalya Estemirova, was murdered while investigating kidnappings and killings in the southern Russian republic of Chechnya.

Last year, the Russian government shut down Memorial, with prosecutors claiming that it “justifies terrorist activities.” On Friday, several Memorial staff members spent the hours after the prize announcement in a Moscow courtroom — where the judge, as expected, ruled to approve the seizure of the organization’s office space.

“The Memorial building goes to the government but, fortunately, the Nobel medal is not sent by mail,” the organization said in a statement afterward.

It was the second year in a row that someone from Russia had won the prize — an unusual streak that underlines the West’s resolve to call out the Kremlin’s repressive actions. Last year, it was a newspaper editor, Dmitri A. Muratov, who shared the Nobel for fighting for press freedoms in Russia; months later, he would be forced to stop publishing.

But this year, the stakes seem immeasurably higher.

Russia pounded civilian targets in missile attacks in southern Ukraine on Friday, even as Ukrainian troops continued to make progress in their counteroffensive on two fronts.

In St. Petersburg, Mr. Putin — who was marking his 70th birthday — received Mr. Lukashenko and other friendly leaders from the former Soviet Union, as analysts and officials around the world tried to game out Mr. Putin’s willingness to use nuclear weapons to try to stem his losses in Ukraine.

The Center for Civil Liberties, the Ukrainian Nobel laureate, has spent 15 years working to pressure the government to make Ukraine a full-fledged democracy governed by the rule of law. With the start of the invasion this February, the center pivoted to documenting war crimes, building on the work it had done amid Ukraine’s pro-Western revolution in 2014 to gather evidence of rights violations and to provide legal assistance to protesters.

Oleksandra Matviychuk, the head of the center’s board, said she was “delighted” that her group had won the prize “along with our friends and partners.” At the time of the announcement on Friday, she was on a train to Kyiv from Warsaw — where both her group and Memorial had participated in a panel discussion at a human rights conference on the forced displacement of Ukrainian civilians to Russia during the war.

“All of my 20 years of experience in the fight for freedom and human rights has shown me that ordinary people have far more influence than they think,” Ms. Matviychuk said. “Mass mobilization of ordinary people in different countries of the world and their joint voice can change world history faster than U.N. intervention.”

Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chairwoman of the Nobel Committee, said the three laureates were “united by the same goals in spite of the borders that divide the three nations.”

“What connects these three prizes together is exactly that people can stand up and make a great difference for a positive development in their countries,” Ms. Reiss-Andersen said in an interview published by the committee.

The laureate from Belarus, Mr. Bialiatski, may not have even learned of his award on Friday. He has been a pillar of the human rights movement in Eastern Europe since the late 1980s, when Belarus was still part of the Soviet Union. He later helped found and lead Viasna, or Spring, a rights group whose members are now nearly all in prison or living in exile.

Mr. Bialiatski was arrested last year, part of a sweeping and brutal crackdown on dissent in Belarus that unfolded across the country after huge street protests erupted in 2020. Mr. Lukashenko, repaying the Kremlin for its support in helping squash those protests, allowed Belarusian territory to be used by Russian forces as staging ground for their invasion of Ukraine.

Mr. Bialiatski’s wife, Natalia Pinchuk, said she had sent a telegram to her husband in jail to inform him of the prize award. She received no reply and does not know whether her message reached him. She has not seen her husband since a few days before his arrest in July 2021, and still has not been told when he will be put on trial and for what charges. Their letters to each other sometimes get delivered, but sometimes don’t arrive for long periods.

“I dare not say what that this award might mean,” Ms. Pinchuk said in a telephone interview from Minsk, the Belarusian capital. “Of course, I have hopes, but I’m afraid to express them. There is always this fear.”

For those fighting autocracy in the former Soviet Union, fear is an ever-present enemy. A Memorial historian in northwest Russia, Yuri Dmitriev, is serving a 15-year prison sentence on sex abuse charges — widely seen as retaliation for his discovery of a killing field where thousands had perished at the hands of Stalin’s secret police.

Memorial has long been seen as a Nobel contender, but in Ukraine, some questioned the message of the prize being awarded to a Russia-based organization in the year that — whatever the group’s achievements — it had failed to prevent its country from invading its neighbor.

“Neither Russian nor Belarusian organizations were able to organize resistance to the war,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, wrote on Twitter.

In Moscow on Friday, Oleg Orlov, a leader of Memorial, stepped out of a court building where the hearing on the seizure of the group’s office space was taking place. To a waiting crowd of journalists, he quoted the Soviet dissident Andrei D. Sakharov: “Peace, progress and human rights are three inextricably linked goals.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Orlov went on, shows that “when human rights are suppressed in one country — for example, in Russia — that country becomes a threat to peace.”

The message: If they wanted peace, Russians also had to fight for human rights. It is a goal, some argued, that other countries seeking to emerge from the Soviet Union’s shadow share.

“All these people are faces of the future,” Artyom Shraibman, a Belarusian political analyst based in Warsaw, said of the three Nobel winners. “The past that they are fighting against is, first of all, the Soviet and totalitarian one.”

Reporting was contributed by Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Oleg Matsnev.