The banning of Memorial signals a move by the Russian government from limited, targeted repression to something much broader
Memorial emerged as a group independent of the state in the late 1980s, at the height of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of. One of its founders was Arseny Roginsky, a historian who spent four years in a Soviet prison for publishing a. Another was Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear scientist who created the first Soviet hydrogen bomb and later campaigned tirelessly for human rights.
Russia’s supreme court is Kremlin-controlled, so its decision was expected. In recent years Memorial has increasingly come under attack, its offices vandalised and its staff harassed. But this did not make the court’s ruling less significant. Memorial paved the way for post-Soviet Russia, its embrace of human dignity drawing a line that separated the new state from the systemic terror of the old one.
The ruling fell on the centenary of Sakharov’s birth and on the 30th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s dissolution. In his farewell speech on December 25th, 1991, Mr Gorbachev proclaimed a new era when human rights would be treated as supreme: “We have paid with all our history and our tragic experiences for these democratic achievements—and they must not be abandoned, whatever the circumstances.”
“The liquidation of Memorial is...a message to the elites: ‘Yes, repressions were necessary and useful to the Soviet state in the past, and they are needed today,’” wrote Grigory Okhotin, who founded-Info, which uses social media to organise legal help for the victims of repression, has been labelled a foreign agent. Its website has been blocked.
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