Sakharov, now in Russia ‘his’ Memorial risks closure

The next Supreme Court hearing for the dissolution of Memorial International has been set for the 28th, just before the New Year holidays. The case is discussed at the request of the Prosecutor’s Office, accusing the organization of having violated the law on foreign agents. The proceeding against the organization for the defense of human rights and the recovery of the memory of the victims of repression, based on nine folders of material, is chaired by judge Alla Nazarova. In parallel proceeds the case for the closure of the Memorial Human Rights Center at the Moscow City Court, which opened the proceedings at the request of the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office. The independent group that is part of the Memorial galaxy, an organization that Andrei Sakharov helped to found and of which he was the first president, is accused of having violated not only the law on foreign agents but also that on extremist and terrorist organizations. Memorial maintains an archive with the files of over 60,000 Soviet citizens, victims of repression and dissidents, and a library with 40,000 books and documents on the history of the USSR, as well as a museum dedicated to the gulag system. Memorial International has a database with more than three million names of victims of repression and another with 41,000 names of NKVD officials between 1935 and 1939, the time of Stalinist terror. Last month, the two Russian Nobel Peace Laureates Mikhail Gorbachev and Dmitry Muratov, the third one was Sakharov himself, jointly denounced that the attempts to close Memorial “are a source of anxiety and concern in the country, and we share them”. The will to cancel Sakharov’s legacy by the authorities in Russia had already manifested itself with the last-minute prohibition, and without a formal explanation, of the exhibition “Andrei Dmitrievic Sakharov: Anxiety and Hope”, organized by the Center that brings the name of the dissident born in Moscow on May 21, 1921. Memorial itself is made more and more difficult, starting with courses in schools on the tragic history of the twentieth century in the Soviet Union and maintaining the library and archives.