Russian President Vladimir Putin is on the verge of liquidating his country’s most important civic organization. Since its founding more than three decades ago, the Memorial Society has pursued a dual mission: to document and increase public awareness of mass repressions during the Soviet era and to promote human rights in today’s Russia.
If Memorial is destroyed, none of the few remaining Russian nongovernmental organizations that dare to assert their independence from the Kremlin will be safe. Shutting down Memorial will jeopardize not just the work performed by its courageous staff and the unique archive of historical documents they have amassed, but also the future of civil society itself in the Russian Federation.
Right now, Western capitals appear to be focused on the Russian troop buildup along the border with Ukraine as well as the refugee crisis cynically manufactured by Moscow’s vassal state, Belarus, on its border with Poland. But the looming assault on Memorial is no less significant. During the Cold War, Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov — who served as Memorial’s first honorary chairman — had the audacity to assert that only countries that respected basic human rights were likely to be responsible actors in the international arena. That remains the case even — or especially — in our own era of disinformation and censorship.
When Memorial was formally recognized in 1989, as the Soviet Union was unraveling, a new category had to be created within Soviet law: that of the nongovernmental organization. Under Soviet rule, numerous groups had posed as independent citizens associations, but all were subject to strict control by the Communist Party. Many were in fact initiated by the authorities to foster the illusion of autonomous citizen engagement in public affairs. This facsimile of civil society caused immeasurable damage to public life by nourishing the belief that no organization was or could be genuinely independent of the state — or of other hidden hands.
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