Memorial (society)
Memorial is an international human rights organisation founded in Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union to study and examine the human rights violations and other crimes committed under Joseph Stalin's reign. Subsequently, it expanded the scope of its research to cover the entire Soviet period. Memorial is the recipient of numerous awards, among others the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.
Prior to its dissolution in Russia in early 2022, it consisted of two separate legal entities, Memorial International, whose purpose was the recording of the crimes against humanity committed in the Soviet Union, particularly during the Stalinist era, and the Memorial Human Rights Centre, which focused on the protection of human rights, especially in conflict zones in and around modern Russia. A movement rather than a unitary system, as of December 2021 Memorial encompassed over 50 organizations in Russia and 11 in other countries, including Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Germany, Italy, Belgium and France. Although the focus of affiliated groups differs from region to region, they share similar concerns about human rights, documenting the past, educating young people and marking remembrance days for the victims of political repression.
Memorial emerged during the perestroika years of the late 1980s, to document the crimes against humanity committed in the USSR during the 20th century and help surviving victims of the Great Terror and the Gulag and their families. Between 1987 and 1990, while the USSR was still in existence, 23 branches of the society were established. When the Soviet Union collapsed, branches of Memorial in Ukraine remained affiliated to the Russian network. Some of the oldest branches of Memorial in northwest and central Russia, the Urals and Siberia later developed websites documenting independent local research and published the crimes of the Soviet regime in their region.
After the Russian foreign agent law was passed in July 2012, Memorial came under increasing government pressure. On 21 July 2014, the Memorial Human Rights Centre was declared a "foreign agent" by the 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. A lawyer for Memorial said it would appeal. The Memorial Human Rights Centre was ordered shut by the Moscow City Court on 29 December 2021; state prosecutors accused it of breaching the foreign agent law and supporting terrorism and extremism. On the same day, the European Court of Human Rights applied an interim measure instructing Russia to halt the forced dissolution of Memorial, pending the outcome of litigation.
On 29 December 2021, Memorial HRC as a legal entity in Russia was closed and liquidated by the Moscow City Court for violating the foreign agent law. On 5 April 2022, the Russian Court of Appeal confirmed the dissolution. Some of Memorial's human rights activities continued in Russia. Memorial continues to operate in other countries, notably in Germany where its oldest and largest non-Russian chapter is based. In October 2022, Memorial was one of the three laureates of that year's Nobel Peace Prize, alongside Ukrainian human rights organisation Centre for Civil Liberties and Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski, for their efforts in "document war crimes, human rights abuses, and the abuse of power".
Early history and predecessors
Memorial's creation was a response to growing public awareness of historic abuses within the Soviet Union during the 1980s, as well as concern about contemporary human rights, especially in certain hotspots around the USSR. This took place within the context of perestroika and glasnost, policies pursued by president Mikhail Gorbachev which led to increased government transparency and tolerance of civil society. An earlier statement of the goals later pursued by the Memorial Society was made by Brezhnev era dissidents in February 1974, following the deportation of dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the USSR. They called for publication in the USSR of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, the opening of all secret police archives relating to the past, and the organization of an international tribunal to examine the crimes of the Soviet secret police.Some of these goals became feasible in the late 1980s when several activists such as Lev Ponomaryov, Yuri Samodurov, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Dmitry Leonov, and Arseny Roginsky proposed a complex to commemorate the victims of Stalinism. Their concept included a monument, a museum, an archive, and a library. An "all-Union informal movement" organized and submitted a petition to the 19th All-Union Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 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 juncture in Memorial's development was its Moscow conference on 29–30 October 1988. After the failure of officialdom to force the postponement of the conference, it gathered 338 delegates from 57 cities and towns. 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. Kryuchkov decried "provocative statements" made by dissidents and young activists during the two-day event.
Secretaries of several creative unions were present as potential trustees of the proposed organization. More radical voices were also heard, including those of the Moscow Popular Front, the newly founded Democratic Union, and uncensored periodicals such as Glasnost and Express Chronicle. Members of the Moscow Action Group of Memorial were 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 Gulag's Solovki camp. In a report to the Politburo, KGB head Kryuchkov singled out Arseny Roginsky, future chairman 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 and its compilers as a model to be emulated.
Memorial was founded on 26–28 January 1989 as a "historical and educational" society at a conference held in the Moscow Aviation Institute. Two years later a distinct Memorial Civil Rights Defense Center was also set up. In a random poll conducted on the streets of Moscow, respondents named many whom they thought suitable candidates for the Memorial Society's board of trustees. The second most popular was Andrei Sakharov, who had won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 for his efforts to promote civil liberties within the Soviet Union; Sakharov became the first Memorial chairman. The exiled Solzhenitsyn was also named but he declined the invitation, saying he could do little to help from abroad; in private, he told Sakharov that the scope of the project should not be restricted to the Stalin era because repressive measures had begun with the October Revolution under Vladimir Lenin.
On 6 July 1989, Memorial organized its first public event by picketing the Chinese Embassy in Moscow in protest over the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Memorial was not formally recognized until 1990 when the organization 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, as well as in Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy, and France.
Mission and 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 prevent a return to totalitarianism;
- To assist the formation of public awareness based on the values of democracy and law, to extirpate totalitarian patterns , 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.
Memorial organized assistance, both legal and financial, for the victims of the Gulag. It conducts research into the history of political repression and shares the findings in books, articles, exhibitions, museums, and the websites of its member organizations.
Day of Remembrance
Moscow Memorial was among the organisations that persuaded the Russian authorities to follow the long-standing 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.Memorial worked on the law "On Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression".