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On December 28, 2021, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of the International Memorial Society, one of Russia鈥檚 oldest human rights and civic organizations. Memorial had been established in 1987 by a group of concerned citizens, including Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov.

A year later the International Memorial Society was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Belarusian human rights activist Ales Bialiatski and the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine.

The real reason for the Russian state鈥檚 attack on Memorial was that the organization鈥檚 ongoing efforts to bring the crimes of the Soviet regime to light made it difficult for the state to celebrate the Soviet Union鈥檚 victory in World War II without also being held responsible for Stalin鈥檚 victims. The state prosecutor made the state鈥檚 aim of taking control over the portrayal of Soviet history explicit at the Supreme Court hearing when he accused Memorial of 鈥渋ncorrectly interpreting Soviet history鈥� and creating a 鈥渇alse image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state.鈥�



Despite the official liquidation of the organization as a legal entity, Memorial鈥檚 members have continued their work on the memory project of coming to terms with the legacy of Soviet repression in the hope of building a democratic future. Unable to prevent this work, which is conducted throughout Russia鈥檚 regions, the Russian state has now come for Memorial鈥檚 champions.

Raid and Arrests

On the morning of March 21, 2023, in Moscow, Memorial鈥檚 leaders, staff, and their family members鈥攊ncluding Ian Rachinsky, Aleksandra Polivanova and her mother, Nikita Petrov, Alena Kozlova, Galina Iordanskaya, Irina Ostrovskaya, Aleksandr Guryanov, and Oleg Orlov鈥攈ad their homes and offices raided. Some, including Rachinsky, Orlov, Polivanova, and Guryanov, were detained and interrogated.

As the International Memorial Society has and on its website, its files, computers, phones, flash drives, and other items bearing the Memorial logo, including a medical mask, were seized during the search. The reason for this renewed attack on Memorial鈥檚 leaders, whose ongoing work is an act of courageous resistance to Putin鈥檚 regime, was an allegation made by the organization Veterans of Russia that Memorial was responsible for rehabilitating Nazi collaborators whose names were included in their database of victims of Stalin鈥檚 mass repressions. The invasion of Ukraine, after all, has been justified in part by Putin鈥檚 false claims that Ukraine is an illegitimate state and needs to be de-Nazified.

In actuality, Veterans of Russia is concerned with only three of the more than three million names in Memorial鈥檚 database (inclusion of those three names in the database appears to have been an error, and one Memorial had ). There is no concrete information about what two of the three people were sentenced for.

The third was one of tens of thousands of ethnic Germans who began settling in Russia in the eighteenth century and whose descendants were persecuted during World War II. Although a minority of Soviet citizens collaborated with the Germans out of hatred for the Stalinist regime, many more, such as Gulag survivor Elena Markova, were sentenced to fifteen-plus years of hard labor in the Gulag or exile for simply having lived in areas under German occupation.

It is unknown what will happen to Memorial鈥檚 leaders in the wake of this attack.



The Politics of Memory

This action on the part of the courts and the state was meant to further intimidate any others from engaging in research that could question the state鈥檚 narrative of the past. It comes at a time when the Russian state is not only arresting protestors but prosecuting citizens of all ages who have dared to question the war online or even in the privacy of a personal conversation.



The civil society Russian citizens built in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union has been crushed by the state under President Vladimir Putin, who has silenced the last independent voices in the state-controlled press, clamped down on NGOs, and imprisoned anyone who criticizes Russia鈥檚 war on Ukraine. The state prevents those who wish to learn the truth about their past from doing so by restricting access to the archives to only those with repressed relatives, whom they intimidate with an opaque and byzantine bureaucracy despite their legal right to access their repressed relatives鈥� files in state archives.

Memory laws like those enacted in Western Europe to criminalize Holocaust denial and racism are used by the Russian state to label the regime鈥檚 critics 鈥淣azis鈥� and to criminalize interpretations of history that challenge the growing cult of victory in World War II. In fact, history in Putin鈥檚 Russia is being singularly distorted to justify the largest land invasion in Europe since World War II. Political repression is arguably the worst it has been in Russia since Stalin. The politics of memory have never had greater implications than they do today.

The opinions expressed in this article are those solely of the author and do not reflect the views of the Kennan Institute.