Interview
Russia’s Memorial for gulag victims is banned, but you can’t eradicate ideas
‘If we talk about Memorial as an idea that unites people, it cannot be banned by any law or judicial decision. Just as an idea cannot be introduced by force, it cannot be banned.’
In Western public opinion, Russian civil society is often described as an environment without dissent, where citizens prefer to remain silent because of the increasingly repressive laws passed by the Kremlin in recent years and the fear of arrest and violence.
Ever since it was constituted in the early 1980s, the Memorial Association chose to fight so that the historical memory of the internees and victims of the gulags would be accepted as valid and would become a means of unhinging the narrative of Soviet power. Later, after the collapse of the USSR, Memorial continued a massive effort to collect oral testimonies (recorded by the association's volunteers) and documentary evidence from the families of the internees.
After Putin's first election, the war in Chechnya, and the heightening of an increasingly hostile climate toward dissent, Memorial chose to openly side with those fighting against the corrupt courts across the enormous expanse of the Russian Federation. Today, Memorial is banned in Russia due to the so-called “foreign agents law,” because a portion of its funds came from donations from abroad.
On the occasion of the Restoring the Names event on October 29 – which this year was not able to take place in front of the highly symbolic Solovetsky Stone, but was held in different forms in many cities around the world and in Russia – we interviewed one of the organizers of the initiative, part of Memorial's leadership and coordinator of the “Last Address” project. For safety reasons, the woman prefers to remain anonymous.
“The initial goal of Restoring the Names was to recall that those who died in the gulag were people like us, who lived together with us before they were deported. Naming them one by one was a way of translating a statistic into a human dimension. Many times we just see numbers: hundreds of thousands of people who died in detention, some were executed, someone died in the camp. But the format of the Solovetsky Stone event was such that it involved reading the names, places of residence and professions of those who were executed. Many of these were Muscovites who were shot, according to the lists that Memorial has been collecting for many years. In the early years, not many people would gather there, only a few dozen, and they would read the names in a circle. One person would read a name, then another would take their place, and sometimes, after reading, they would go to the end of the line and wait for their turn again. However, each year there are more and more people, and in 2018-2019 there were about 5-7,000 people in total present during the day. The event started at 10 a.m. and ended at 10 p.m. Names were read continuously for twelve hours.” On those occasions, those who wanted to read sometimes waited up to 5 hours in line, which gives an idea of how powerful that simple action was: saying a name in front of the symbolic place of repression in Russia.
Then, in 2020, the event was held online because of the pandemic. And after that point, everything changed. Officially, the ban remains in place for public health reasons. “But anyone who lives in Moscow knows that there are no quarantine measures. This is shown by the fact that stadiums, circuses and cinemas are filled to capacity and there is no mask mandate. However, in both 2023 and 2024, our application was not approved on the pretext of ‘Covid-19.’ One would think that Covid is rampant in Lubyanka Square in particular. We are trying to challenge this in court, but it is difficult. However, we are doing our best to fight this kind of selective enforcement.”
Memorial being banned certainly must have had an impact. “Yes, people began to be afraid. Since Memorial International was classified as a foreign agent in 2016. there has been this paradox: according to the government, a foreign agent is commemorating the names of our murdered compatriots.”
One often gets the impression that Vladimir Putin is rehabilitating the historical figure of Stalin, and perhaps that is also why Memorial has been prevented from continuing to operate in Russia. “It would be possible to talk about rehabilitation of the figure of Stalin if Stalin had actually been condemned. But in Russia, there has never been a rigorous legal assessment of state terror, and when we talk about Stalin's crimes, it's a figure of speech, not literal at all—only a court can call a person a criminal, as we know. The truth is, there was no ruling against him, so there can be no rehabilitation. The fact that monuments to Stalin are now popping up, from one place to the next, and that there is talk of naming something after him, of renaming Volgograd to Stalingrad, shows a tendency that exists in society. This trend is not formally defined, and it is not possible to point to it in a specific manner, but the attitudes are there. And all of this is significant.”
People say that today, opposition to Putin is possible only outside Russia. At the same time, Putin exploits the fact that many well-known names (e.g., Yulia Navalnaya) are abroad to accuse them of being paid by the West and of being anti-Russian. How can this rhetoric be defeated? “To be the opposition in Russia, you would have to be able to be elected or at least have independent media. And there is no more independent media or the possibility to stand for election. But the opposition, the small, spontaneous, grassroots opposition, still exists in one way or another. In many projects, it is people's engagement that creates a kind of daily nonviolent opposition, simply by refusing to recognize the status quo. Parties need to be able to register to create real political opposition. If all this is not possible, then, of course, any kind of organized stand is almost impossible to achieve. And this is exactly what we see now. So, it’s difficult to say. There is no one openly supporting us. However, for example, there are several former city officials, even though they were not officially elected to city councils, who continue to be active citizens in their areas and do things that help us in one way or another.”
But what could be the role of something like Memorial in today's Russia? “If we talk about Memorial as an idea that unites people, it cannot be banned by any law or judicial decision. Just as an idea cannot be introduced by force, it cannot be banned. A legal entity can be liquidated, but the community of people united by a common cause cannot be. And if these people consider it their life's work, of course it will continue to exist.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/lidea-non-si-liquida on 2024-10-29