Kremlin seeks to control history: group

Justice Ministry asks court to order Memorial’s ‘liquidation’

MOSCOW, Oct 19, (RTRS): At the height of the uprising by pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine this summer, a handful of human rights workers recorded that Russian soldiers had been killed on the battlefield, even though the Kremlin said its troops were never there.

It was typical work for activists from the group Memorial, which has emerged since the fall of the Soviet Union as Russia’s most important human rights organisation mainly by taking notes.

Memorial was founded by Sovietera dissidents to document the historical crimes of the Communist dictatorship’s Gulag. It came into its own during two wars in Chechnya in the 1990s and early 2000s, when it sent teams of researchers into the conflict zone, documenting the disappearances of civilians whose cases would otherwise have gone unrecorded.

It has always been risky work: one of Memorial’s board members, Natalya Estemirova, was kidnapped and killed in Chechnya in 2009 while researching allegations of abuse by pro-Moscow authorities there. The crime has never been solved.

But even though the group has clashed with the Kremlin on so many occasions, the authorities never actually tried to shut it down. Until now.

Last month, the Justice Ministry announced that it had appealed to the Supreme Court to have Memorial “liquidated” for what it described as repeated violations of the Russian constitution and Russian law.

For Oleg Orlov, one of the group’s founding members, the push to shut down Memorial shows that the Kremlin is determined not only to stifle dissent in the present, but to control the past.

“Kremlin propaganda needs to show that Russia has always moved from victory to victory. In these current conditions of propagandistic hysteria, we’re simply not needed,” Orlov said.

Controlling the narrative has been the foremost weapon of war for Russia in Ukraine since it seized the Crimea region in March. The Kremlin insisted from the start that its own troops were not operating in Ukraine, first in Crimea and later in the eastern provinces seized by heavily armed pro-Russian rebels.

“Memorial discussed the accusa- tions of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, it knew what going on,” said Sergei Krivenko, a member of the group who led efforts to document the deaths of Russian soldiers on Ukrainian soil.

It is easy to see how that work might anger the Kremlin. But some Memorial activists say the group’s documentation of the crimes of the Soviet era, when millions perished in the Gulag prisons of Joseph Stalin, is as dangerous to Putin’s mythology as its work on present-day events in Ukraine or Chechnya.

In 2012, when Putin returned to the presidency after stepping aside for a term as prime minister, he passed a law requiring all organisations that receive overseas funding to register as “foreign agents”. Memorial was tarred with that label, with its implication of disloyalty, last year.

As Putin’s approval rating soars to 82 percent, Kremlin controlled media have increasingly trumpeted the victories of Russia’s Soviet past. Enemies, like the government in Kiev, are being tarred with words used to describe the Nazis that the Soviet Army defeated in World War Two.

Little surprise then that graffiti scrawled across the door of Memorial’s Moscow headquarters this year read: “fascists”.

Those like Memorial who point to the dark side of Russia’s Soviet history say they are finding their message increasingly unwelcome. At the former “Perm 36” labour camp in the Ural Mountains, the only Gulag prison still standing, activists have opened a Museum of the History of Political Repression.

Regional Memorial representative Robert Latypov said local authorities were trying to cut back the museum’s activities, which include an annual gathering of former prisoners and dissidents.

“We work with a very tragic history, the theme of political repression, and through the prism of that tragic past we try to talk about the need for human rights and democracy,” he said.

“But the authorities have no need for a tragic past. They only want a proud past to boost patriotism and boost Putin’s own popularity ratings,” he said by telephone.