The end of the oldest and most famous of Russian human rights associations, Guardian of the memory of the victims of the Stalinist terror, was pronounced by the Supreme Court, Tuesday, December 28th.
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The shock wave has spread across the country and beyond its borders, when Tuesday, December 28, the Supreme Court of Russia delivered the dissolution of International Memorial, the Russian non-governmental organization The oldest and best known for his research on the repressions of the Soviet era. The verdict was stated in minutes by Judge Alla Nazarova, who said “Accessing the Parquet’s request”.
In front of the Court, the prosecutor Alexei Jafiarov did not leave any chance to the organization: “It is obvious that memorial, speculating on the theme of repression at the XX e century, Creates a misleading image of the USSR as a terrorist state, “he came to conclude by accusing him, in addition, to” whiten and rehabilitate Nazis criminals “. Outside, anonymous, coming to support the organization, continued to brandish pancarts “we will never die.”
For many Russians in search of the spell of their loved ones, the NGO played a leading role in the Stalinist terror documentation of which families were victims. She still continues to do so today, while these crimes are relativised or put under the carpet. His disappearance is in this words, the current Russian power, whose representatives proudly claim the heritage of the Soviet security services, gets rid of the last organization openly criticizing this legacy and pointing the similarities between past and present practices.
Thirty years just after the disappearance of the USSR, endorsed on 25 December 1991, the decision of Russian justice thus signs the magnitude of the back. The Foundation of Memorial, in 1989, by dissidents, including the Nobel Peace Award Andrei Sakharov, constituted, in addition to being an acquired of the Perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev, the symbol of a post-Soviet Russia decided to do Faced with his past and Stalinist crimes. Its closing is another, announcing a new wave of repression in a country led for almost twenty-two years by a man, Vladimir Putin, more than ever determined to rewrite the story and to control civil society. “It’s a field, history, become very political again. We preserve the memory of millions of victims, Putin wants to keep falsified history,” says Alexandre Cherkassov, a longtime activist and member of the board of memorial International, seal by phone.
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