Memorial

Memorial (society)

Memorial (Russian: Мемориа́л) is a Russian human rights organisation.  Between 1987 and 1990, while the USSR was still in existence, 23 branches of the society were established and became active. When the Soviet Union collapsed, branches of Memorial in east and south Ukraine remained affiliated to the Russian network. Some of the oldest branches of Memorial in northwest and central Russia, the Urals and Siberia have since developed their own websites, documenting independent local research and publicising the crimes of the Soviet regime in their region: for example, St Petersburg, Ryazan, Perm, Tomsk, and Krasnoyarsk.

A movement rather than a centralised organisation, by 2018 there were over 60 branches of Memorial and affiliated organisations in Russia.  A quarter of these branches were established in 2014 or later. They share similar concerns about human rights, documenting the past, educating the young and marking Remembrance Days for the "victims of political repression", but the focus differs from region to region, depending on local needs, membership and circumstances, e.g. the Ryazan Memorial website is titled "HRO.org" (Human Rights Organisation) while that of Tomsk Memorial is accessed via the "nkvd.tomsk.ru" website. After the Russian foreign agent law was passed in July 2012 Memorial came under increasing official pressure. On 21 July 2014, the Memorial Human Rights Centre was declared a "foreign agent" by the RF Ministry of Justice. The label was extended in November 2015 to the Research & Information Centre at St Petersburg Memorial, and on 4 October 2016 to Memorial International itself.  On 28 December 2021, the Supreme Court of Russia ordered Memorial International to close for violations of the foreign agent law.

Early history and predecessors Memorial's creation was a response to the revelations during perestroika about the Soviet past and concern about human rights in the present, especially in certain "hotspots" around the USSR. An early statement of some of the goals later pursued by the Memorial Society was made by Brezhnev-era dissidents in the Moscow Appeal of 13 February 1974, following the deportation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the USSR. They called for the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, the opening of all secret police archives relating to the past, and the organisation of an international tribunal to examine the crimes of the Soviet secret police. Some of these goals became feasible in the late 1980s and a number of activists (Lev Ponomaryov, Yuri Samodurov, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Dmitry Leonov, Arseny Roginsky and others) proposed a complex to commemorate the victims of Joseph Stalin's repressive regime. Their concept included a monument, a museum, an archive, and a library. An "all-Union informal movement" came into being. It organized and submitted a petition to the 19th Party Conference held in 1988, and that body supported Politburo proposals for the creation of a monument to the victims of political repression during the cult of personality under Stalin. A similar decision by the 22nd Congress of the CPSU in 1961 had been ignored for many years.

A significant moment in Memorial's development was its Moscow conference on 29–30 October 1988. After the failure of officialdom and moderates to ensure the conference was postponed, it gathered 338 delegates from 57 towns and cities. In a report to the Politburo dated 16 November the new KGB head Vladimir Kryuchkov observed that 66% of the delegates came from Moscow and the Moscow Region. His main focus was on the "provocative statements" made by former dissidents and young activists during the two-day event. Secretaries of several creative unions (Architects, Designers, Artists and Film-makers) were present as potential trustees. More radical voices were also heard: the Moscow Popular Front, the newly founded Democratic Union, uncensored periodicals such as Glasnost and Express Chronicle. Many of the Moscow Action Group of Memorial were to be found among the radicals. The conference was addressed by dissidents Larisa Bogoraz and Elena Bonner, and by the octogenarian writer Oleg Volkov, an early inmate of the Solovki camp. In his report to the Politburo, KGB head Kryuchkov singled out Arseny Roginsky, future chairman (1998–2017) of International Memorial, as particularly outspoken. Memorial should become an heir to the Helsinki Groups of the late Soviet period, said Roginsky, and he named the Chronicle of Current Events (1968–1982) and its compilers as a model to be emulated.

Memorial was founded the following year as a "historical and educational" society at a conference held in the Moscow Aviation Institute on 26–28 January 1989. Two years later a distinct "Memorial" Civil Rights Defense Center was also set up.  In a random poll conducted on the streets of Moscow the public named many whom it thought suitable candidates for the Memorial Society's board of trustees. The second most popular was Andrei Sakharov and he became the first chairman of Memorial. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was also named but he declined the invitation, saying in public that he could do little to help from abroad but in private he told Andrei Sakharov that the scope of the project should not be restricted to the Stalin era since repressive measures had begun with the 1917 October Revolution. The Memorial Society was not formally recognised, however, until an exchange in December 1989 between Mikhail Gorbachev and Yelena Bonner at Andrei Sakharov's funeral. Gorbachev asked Bonner, "How can we commemorate your husband?" She replied, "register Memorial!" Six weeks later the organisation finally acquired official status. On 19 April 1992, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Memorial was reconstituted as an International NGO, a "historical, educational, human-rights and charitable society",  with organizations in several post-Soviet states: Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Georgia, as well as in Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy (since 20 April 2004) and most recently in France.

Mission and activities After the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991, Memorial reconstituted itself as International Memorial, a society engaged in "Historical, Educational, Human Rights And Charitable" activities. According to its post-Soviet 1992 charter, Memorial pursued the following aims: To promote mature civil society and democracy based on the rule of law and thus to prevent a return to totalitarianism; To assist the formation of public awareness based on the values of democracy and law, to extirpate totalitarian patterns [of thought and behaviour], and to firmly establish human rights in everyday politics and public life; To promote the truth about the historical past and perpetuate the memory of the victims of political repression carried out by totalitarian regimes. Its online database contains details of the victims of political repression in the USSR, the fifth version has over three million names, but it was estimated that 75% of the victims had not yet been identified and recorded. Memorial organizes assistance, both legal and financial, for the victims of the Gulag. It also conducts research into the history of political repression and publicizes the findings in books, articles, exhibitions, museums, and websites of its member organizations.

Rehabilitation and remembrance

A Day and Place of Remembrance Moscow Memorial was among the organisations that persuaded the Russian authorities to follow the longstanding dissident tradition of marking 30 October each year, transforming it into an official Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions. Over the next thirty years this date was adopted across Russia: by 2016 annual events were held on 30 October at 103 of the 411 burial grounds and commemorative sites included on the "Russia's Necropolis" website. On 30 October 1990, a plain boulder from the Solovki prison camp on the White Sea, was erected in front of the Polytechnical Museum on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. This placed it in close proximity to the headquarters of the KGB, its Soviet predecessors since 1918, and the present Federal Security Service (or FSB). The base of the monument reads: "To the Victims of Political Repression". Its appearance resolved a long and inconclusive public debate about the form that such a monument should take.

The Solovki Stone The Solovetsky Stone was a reminder that the USSR's first permanent concentration camp was established in 1923 when Lenin was leader of Soviet Russia. In Solzhenitsyn's vivid analogy, the Solovki prison camp on the Solovetsky Islands was the malignant cell from which the entire Gulag system evolved and spread like a cancer throughout the Soviet Union.  In time, the Stone on Lubyanka Square became the focus of remembrance in Moscow. The idea was replicated more than once, in St Petersburg, for instance, when the local Memorial Society erected a similar memorial in 2002. The original impulse came from northwest Russia. In 1990, the local "Sovest" (Conscience) society was preparing to erect such a boulder in Arkhangelsk for the same commemorative purpose. Hearing of this proposal, Moscow Memorial requested Sovest to select a similar boulder and arranged for its transport to Moscow where it was erected on Lubyanka Square. For the next nine months, the Solovki Stone faced the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, which stood in the centre of the square. After the attempted August 1991 coup, the Dzerzhinsky statue, first erected in 1958, was toppled and removed. In the 1990s, the Stone became the site for the commemoration in Moscow of the "Day of Remembrance" on 30 October each year. Later, from 2007 onwards, it was also the focus of a yearly ceremony "Restoring the Names" held on the previous day, 29 October. For hour after hour, a long queue of volunteers waited to read out one or more names of those who were executed in Moscow and the Moscow Region or sent to the camps during the 1930s. In 2016, the recitation continued for 12 hours.

October 1991 Law on Rehabilitation Memorial was among the many organisations and individuals that worked to draft and then secure the passing through the RSFSR Supreme Soviet of the "Law on Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression". Under its terms, up to 12 million Russian citizens and their descendants qualified as Victims of Political Repression. An achievement for its time, the law is now seen as too restrictive, only admitting those formally rehabilitated under Khrushchev in 1956–1964 or under Gorbachev in 1985–1991. It excludes, for instance, many of the peasant families "dekulakized" and deported during the forced collectivisation of agriculture (1928–1933) who only began to receive rehabilitation in the 1990s.

Attempts to backtrack by the city and federal authorities In October 2018, the Moscow authorities suggested that acts of commemoration henceforth take place at the new Wall of Sorrow, opened the year before on 30 October 2017 by President Putin and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church. By then, the tradition and public feeling were too strong for the event to be moved anywhere else but the Solovki Stone across the road from FSB headquarters. As of 2020, however, no direction to the monument has been added to the pedestrian passages that run under Lubyanka Square. There are directions to the Biblio-globus bookshop, the Detsky Mir toyshop and the "Lubyanka Square" metro station. After many years, nothing indicates the way to FSB (KGB) headquarters or the Monument to the Victims of Political Repression. In December 2020, the suggestion was made that Dzerzhinsky's statue resume its former place in the centre of Lubyanka Square. A group calling themselves "The Officers of Russia" began a campaign to this end and on 26 April 2021 announced that the removal of the statue had been declared illegal by the Moscow City Prosecutor's Office. Opponents encouraged those opposed to this action to protest against the proposal.

Research, education and information Throughout its existence, but particularly since 2012, the International Memorial Society has widened its range of activities. Today these include the Last Address project and, following the example of Berlin and its Topography of Terror excursions and exhibitions, the society has organised similar educational ventures about the Soviet era in Moscow and other Russian cities.

Archives and online database In 2005, Memorial had a database containing records of more than 1,300,000 victims of political repression by the Soviet regime. First issued as a CD, by 2020 the fifth edition of the database was universally available online and held over three million entries of those shot, imprisoned or deported during the Soviet period.This resource was created mainly by gathering the information accumulated all over Russia since the late 1980s in Books of Remembrance. Commenting on this work Memorial had the following to say about this apparently "impressive number": "The present version contains, we estimate, no more than a quarter of the victims of political terror [in the USSR], even if we restrict ourselves to individuals covered by the terms of the October 1991 Law 'On the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression' and include only those who were executed, imprisoned or deported." A more recent development is the Open List database which now exists in several languages of the former Soviet Union (Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian and Belorussian) and encourages relatives and descendants of those shot, imprisoned and deported to themselves contribute information about the victims and their families. This expands sources of information beyond the dry records of the case files kept on individuals by the Soviet security services or the police.

School programmes Since 1999, Memorial has organised an annual competition for secondary school students around the theme "The Individual and History: Russia in the 20th century". It receives between 1,500 and 2,000 entries each year. Authors of the 40 best contributioins are invited to Moscow to attend a special school-academy and the awards ceremony. The jury has been headed in the past by Otto Sigurd and Svetlana Aleksiyevich. Author Ludmila Ulitskaya is the present chair. Some of the best entries, the judges say, are sent from the most remote parts of Russia. To date, 26 collections of the best entries to the competition have been published: most can be found on the "Lessons of History" website.

The Virtual Gulag and the Map of Memory ("Russia's Necropolis") In the early 21st century, Memorial in St Petersburg worked to create the "Virtual Gulag" Museum. This was intended to bring together research and archives from all over the former Soviet Union and to commemorate and record the existence of the Gulag and the lives of its inmates. Disrupted by the 2009 seizure in Petersburg of much of the materials on which the project was based (see "Persecution" below), and faced with a need to update the information (and the technology), it was decided to create a map of the burial grounds, graveyards and commemorative sites across Russia. Launched in Russian in 2016, an English-language version, "Russia's Necropolis of Terror and the Gulag" followed in August 2021. This unique resource documents over 400 sites, some dating back to the Civil War, noting their state of preservation, monuments and ceremonies, and whether they have protected status. "Russia's Necropolis" includes not only the discovered killing fields of the Great Terror such as Krasny Bor, or the abandoned burial grounds of the Gulag, but also 138 graveyards of the "special" settlements to which "dekulakized" peasant families and then Poles, Lithuanians and others were deported in their tens of thousands.

Two execution sites from the Great Terror illustrate the activities recorded by "Russia's Necropolis". At the Kovalevsky Woods near Petersburg Memorial are trying to build a National Memorial Museum Complex in Kovalevsky Forest to commemorate alleged 4,500 victims of the Red Terror who were killed and buried there. Memorial workers discovered the bodies in 2002. At the Sandarmokh killing field, 1937–1938 in Karelia a unique memorial complex already exists, thanks to the efforts of Yury A. Dmitriev. In July 1997 a joint expedition of the St Petersburg and Karelian Memorial societies Led by Dmitriev, Irina Flige, and the late Veniamin Joffe, the expedition found 236 common graves containing the bodies of at least 6,000 victims of Stalin, executed in 1937 and 1938. In 2016, the Russian government attempted to revise this account of the shootings at Sandarmokh, and claim that among the dead were Soviet POWs, shot by invading Finns in 1941–1944. Memorial representatives challenged both the motivation behind this claim and the purported new evidence intended to support it.

A Chronicle of Current Events (1968–1982) In 2008, Memorial HRC launched an online version of the noted samizdat publication, A Chronicle of Current Events, which had been distributed in the Soviet Union. Appearing at irregular intervals during the year, the Chronicle had circulated in typescript form (samizdat) in the USSR from 1968 to 1983. All of its 63 issues were also translated into English and published abroad.Western observers and scholars considered it to be a key source of trustworthy information about human rights in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. The launch of the online version was held at Memorial's office in Karetny pereulok. Many former editors of the underground publication attended, including Sergei Kovalev and Alexander Lavut.

Media Memorial funds or helps to produce various publications and films related to this topic. One such film was the documentary The Crying Sun (2007), focusing on the life of people from the mountain village of Zumsoy in Chechnya, and their struggle to preserve their cultural identity in the face of military raids and enforced disappearances by the Russian army and guerilla fighters. The 25-minute film was produced in collaboration with WITNESS.

Awards and nominations In 2004, the Memorial Human Rights Centre (HRC) was among the four recipients of the Right Livelihood Award, for its work in documenting violations of human rights in Russia and other former states in the USSR. Quoting the RLA jury: " for showing, under very difficult conditions, and with great personal courage, that history must be recorded and understood, and human rights respected everywhere, if sustainable solutions to the legacy of the past are to be achieved." In the same year, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) named Memorial HRC as the winner of the annual Nansen Refugee Award for its wide range of services on behalf of forced migrants and internally displaced people in the Russian Federation, as well as refugees from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In 2008, Memorial won the Hermann Kesten Prize. In 2009, Memorial won the Sakharov Prize of the European Union, in memory of murdered Memorial activist Natalya Estemirova. Announcing the award, President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek said that the assembly hoped "to contribute to ending the circle of fear and violence surrounding human rights defenders in the Russian Federation". Oleg Orlov, a board member of Memorial, commented that the prize represents "much-needed moral support at a difficult time for rights activists in Russia", and that he considers the prize "a mark of the high value placed on the work of Memorial and that of all of our colleagues – Russian rights activists who are working in a very difficult situation". A cash reward, which comes with the prize, of €50,000 was awarded to Memorial in December 2009. The writer and historian Irina Scherbakowa, a founder and staff member of Memorial, was given the Ossietzky Award and the Goethe Medal for her work relating to Memorial's activities. In 2009, Memorial HRC was awarded the Victor Gollancz Prize by the Society for Threatened Peoples. On 4 February 2015, Lech Wałęsa nominated Memorial International for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize

Persecution In the 1990s, Memorial researchers gained access to central FSB archives and many significant documents about collectivisation, the Gulag and the Great Terror were found and published. Outside the capital, the situation across the country varied considerably. After the controversial third-term re-election of Vladimir Putin in 2012, civil society as a whole and Memorial in particular were increasingly out of favour. "Since the summer of 2012 dozens of laws, restricting freedom of speech and the participation of ordinary citizens in running their country have been passed in Russia," commented Olga Gnezdilova of Article 20 in October 2016. "The unfettered power of the authorities has wrecked a system of checks and balances that had hardly begun to take shape. Part of that system is civil society."

Confiscation of digital archive, 2008 On 4 December 2008, Memorial's St Petersburg office was raided by the authorities. Officers confiscated 11 computer hard disks, representing 20 years of research. The information was being used to develop "a universally accessible database with hundreds of thousands of names." Director Irina Flige thought Memorial was being targeted because it was on the wrong side of Putinism, specifically the idea "that Stalin and the Soviet regime were successful in creating a great country". The raid was supposedly related to a xenophobic article in a June 2007 issue of the Novy Peterburg newspaper. Memorial denied any link to the publication. Some human rights lawyers in Russia speculated that the raid was retaliation for St Petersburg Memorial screening a banned film Rebellion: the Litvinenko Case (2007), about the murder of Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko in Great Britain in 2006. Allison Gill, director of Human Rights Watch in Moscow, said "This outrageous police raid shows the poisonous climate for non-governmental organisations in Russia [...] This is an overt attempt by the Russian government [...] to silence critical voices." Academics from all over the world, signed an open letter to then President Dmitry Medvedev that condemned the seizure of disks and material. The United States declared itself "deeply concerned" about the raid: State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said: "Unfortunately, this action against Memorial is not an isolated instance of pressure against freedom of association and expression in Russia." On 20 March 2009, the city's Dzerzhinsky district court ruled that the December 2008 search and confiscation of 12 HDDs was carried out with procedural violations; the actions of law enforcement bodies were illegal. Eventually the 12 hard drives, plus optical discs and some papers, were returned to Memorial in 2009.

Activities in Chechnya and the North Caucasus, 1994–2018 Activists linked to Memorial played a key role during the first Chechen conflict (1994-1996), when Russia's human rights ombudsman Sergei Kovalyov spent days in Grozny under bombardment by federal aviation. They moved between the two sides in the conflict, searching for the missing and arranging exchanges of those killed during the fighting. It became much harder for human rights activists to act impartially during the second Chechen conflict (1999-2005). Memorial's office in Grozny was frequently raided by the authorities. Memorial activist Natalia Estemirova, a close colleague of the murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya (1958-2006), investigated murders and abductions in Chechnya, until she herself was kidnapped in Grozny and shot dead in neighbouring Ingushetia on 15 July 2009. BBC reporters suggested her death was connected to her investigations of government-backed militias in the country.Three days later, Memorial suspended its activities in Chechnya, stating "We cannot risk the lives of our colleagues even if they are ready to carry on their work." Oleg Orlov, a Memorial board member with much experience of the North Caucasus, accused Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov of being behind the murder. and claimed that Kadyrov had openly threatened her.Kadyrov denied his involvement and sued Memorial for defamation, naming Orlov specifically in his complaint. Several years later the case was yet to be resolved. On 17 January 2018, masked arsonists set fire to Memorial's North Caucasus office in Nazran, Ingushetia.

"Foreign agent" status, 2014–2020 The first part of Memorial to be declared a "foreign agent" was its Moscow-based Human Rights Centre in July 2014. The following year, the Ministry of Justice designated the Research & Information Centre at St Petersburg Memorial, two Memorial organisations in Yekaterinburg and that in Ryazan "foreign agents". Finally, on 4 October 2016, the law requiring organizations that accepted funds from abroad and engaged in "political activities" to register and declare themselves as a "foreign agent" was applied to Memorial International. Memorial HRC and International Memorial disputed this designation of their status in the courts and having exhausted such legal recourse with the Russian judicial system applied to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg. The Research & Information Centre at Petersburg Memorial declared that it would continue its work and projects but "did not intend to mark all its publications with such a stamp", designating it a foreign agent. It informed "all interested persons that RIC Memorial's public activities would be continued by the Joffe Foundation". in its 2015 annual "foreign agent" audit, Russia's Justice Ministry accused the Memorial Human Rights Centre of "undermining the foundations of the constitutional order of the Russian Federation" and of calling for "a change of political regime" in the country. Memorial International's designation as a "foreign agent" was part of the State's ongoing battle with NGOs and civil society, wrote Human Rights Watch in 2018. By autumn 2019, Memorial and its new chairman, Jan Raczynski, faced fines of 3,700,000 roubles for infringing the terms of the foreign agent law: a sum that was raised through crowdfunding .In 2020, Memorial submitted a complaint to the ECHR about these excessive fines and harassment.

Intimidation and order to close, 2021 On 14 October 2021, around 20 men broke into the Moscow offices of Memorial and interrupted a public film screening of Mr Jones film by hostile chants. Memorial’s staff called the police, but by the time the officers arrived most of the intruders had dispersed, and police led away the three who remained. Then, without explanation, the police blocked the people in the Memorial’s building from leaving and held them there for hours, late into the night, forcing everyone to provide full passport details, residential address, phone number, as well as information about their education, workplace, and work title. The first calls for the closure of Memorial were made by Minister of Justice Aleksandr Konovalov in an application to the Supreme Court in 2014. If Memorial was closed, commented its chairman Arseny Roginsky, then the organisation's many branches would have to re-register and thereafter restore contacts across the country. In January 2015, the Court announced that it would not uphold the Ministry's request. On 11 November 2021, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office announced that it had submitted a lawsuit to the Supreme Court, seeking to close Memorial International over violations of the Russian foreign agent law.[93] The following day, it became known that the Moscow City Prosecutor's Office filed a lawsuit with the Moscow City Court requesting closure of the Memorial Human Rights Centre. The lawsuits would be heard on 26 and 23 November, respectively. On 28 December 2021, the Supreme Court of Russia ordered Memorial International to close for violations of the foreign agent law.

Future aims In April 2021, Memorial researchers Sergei Krivenko and Sergei Prudovsky published a study of the "national" operations conducted by the NKVD during the Great Terror, 1937-1938. Examining the available documents, they noted that the FSB, proud successor to the NKVD and KGB, had still not fulfilled the terms of a June 1992 edit issued by President Boris Yeltsin. This demanded that all legislative acts and other documentation that "served as the basis for mass repressive measures and violations of human rights" should be declassified and made publicly available within three months. The Great Terror, among other Soviet campaigns of repression, were clearly such "crimes against humanity" and therefore were subject to no statute of limitation. In 1968, the USSR had acceded to the UN Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity yet decades later, and thirty years after the 1992 presidential edict, the researchers were filing cases in the courts to pressure regional branches of the FSB to release documents about the Great Terror over 80 years earlier. Krivenko was an academic and a founding member of Memorial; Prudovsky began by researching the fate of his grandfather and has spent the last ten years on a wide-ranging study of political repression in the 1930s. The past has still not been fully documented. An ever-growing list of prisoners of conscience and political prisoners in today's Russia (the Memorial Human Rights Centre issued its latest list of 377 names on 9 November 2021) is seen as a clear link drawn by Memorial from the outset between past atrocities and today's human rights violations: this refers, on the one hand, to hotspots around the Soviet Union and Russia, the two wars in Chechnya, or recent conflict with neighbouring countries (Georgia, Ukraine) and, on the other, to the increasingly repressive current domestic regime.

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