Memorial raided, Oleg Orlov charged (March 2023)

23 March 202312 April 2023 / editors (JC)

The Russian authorities have carried out mass raids and searches of the office of the Memorial Society and its members, writes Halya Coynash on the website of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group (KHPG).

Orlov protest in central Moscow (2022)
“A crazed Putin is pushing the world towards nuclear war”

Veteran activist and Memorial co-chairman Oleg ORLOV now faces criminal charges and a likely term of imprisonment for supposedly ‘discrediting’ the Russian armed forces. The move comes a little over a year after Russia forcibly dissolved International Memorial and the Memorial Human Rights Centre, and almost exactly three months after Memorial, together with Ukraine’s Centre for Civil Liberties and the Belarusian Viasna Human Rights Centre (and its leader Ales Bialiatski), became laureate of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.

“Rehabilitating Nazism”

The pretext for the heavy-handed methods used on 21 March was a criminal investigation initiated on 3 March 2023 over alleged ‘rehabilitation of Nazism’. This was supposedly based on a complaint from the Veterans of Russia NGO which claimed to have found around twenty names of those convicted of collaborating with Nazi Germany on Memorial’s massive “List of the Victims of Political Terror in the USSR”.

The current regime is using this charge in an attempt to discredit the internationally respected Memorial and the vital work it has done in studying the Soviet Terror and naming both its victims and the perpetrators. Although the offensive against Memorial began shortly before Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 and was doubtless prompted in part by Memorial’s stand on Russia’s aggression, the first complaints about names on the “List of Victims” came in //2021, around the time that the regime was seeking the organization’s dissolution. In December 2021, Memorial reacted to complaints, echoed by Russian leader Vladimir Putin, about three people on the List, by saying that the three had been removed. In a list containing over three million names, Memorial pointed out, mistakes of this nature were surely inevitable. The same clearly applies now.

Russia’s attack on historians of the Terror, and particularly Yury DMITRIEV, head of the Karelian branch of Memorial, used scurrilous and entirely fabricated ‘child pornography’ charges to try to discredit both Dmitriev and Memorial. The same method is now being used with this ‘rehabilitation of Nazism’ case, and the high-profile searches of a large number of members of Memorial.

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Memorial appeal hearing today; and an anti-war concert

28 February 202228 February 2022 / editors (JC)

In late December Russia’s Supreme Court ordered International Memorial to disband as an organisation, after 33 years existence. This morning Memorial’s appeal against that ruling will be heard by the Court’s appeals board.

Following that hearing Memorial has organised a concert against the war being waged on Ukraine by Russia’s land, sea and air forces.

Putin (not “Russia”) wants a war with Ukraine

26 February 202226 February 2022 / editors (JC)

Russia lodges surreal claim against Ukraine in Strasbourg

25 July 202125 July 2021 / editors (JC)

DMITRIEV’s recent problems can be traced back to 5 August 2014 when he denounced the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of east Ukraine at Sandarmokh during the annual Day of Remembrance. This spring, over five years after since his arrest in mid-December 2016, lawyers from Memorial submitted an appeal on his behalf to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. In Russia, meanwhile, his case has reached the Supreme Court.

Here Halya Coynash discusses Russia’s own bizarre appeal to the ECtHR, concerning the shooting down of flight MH17 in July 2014 and the issue of mainland supplies of water to Crimea, occupied by Russia since February 2014 (24 July, Human Rights in Ukraine).

“Russia has lodged its first ever inter-state application at the European Court of Human Rights [ECtHR], with a series of claims against Ukraine. There seem no grounds for taking any of the accusations seriously, however two are of particularly staggering cynicism.

After sending the BUK surface-to-air missile carrier to Donbas where it was used to down Malaysian airliner MH17 and kill all 298 passengers and crew on board, Russia has brought a claim against Ukraine for not having closed its airspace. It has also accused Ukraine of not providing water to Crimea, invaded by Russia in February 2014 and illegally occupied ever since.

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Punished for memorialising Sandarmokh

29 January 202015 December 2020 / editors (JC)

Russian historian Yury DMITRIEV turned 64 on 28 January 2020. It was his third birthday detained on charges that bear no scrutiny, and, writes Halya Coynash, his arrest coincided with the beginnings of a campaign to rewrite the history of one of the darkest pages of the Soviet Terror – the mass killing by quota of Russians, Ukrainians and other prisoners of the Solovetsky Archipelago at the Sandormokh Clearing in Karelia in 1937.

Yury Dmitriev in April 2018; the entrance to the Sandormokh memorial complex

If the current regime in Russia was hoping to silence Dmitriev, it has failed. The historian and head of the Karelian branch of the Memorial Society has just published a book entitled Sandarmokh: A Place of Memory, providing information about both the victims and the perpetrators of the mass executions in the forest.

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