Putin wants to control history by banning Memorial – Pierre Haski

There are symbols that we think are untouchable and unassailable, such as the name of Andrei Sakharov and the work on the memory of Stalinism and the gulag carried out, even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, by this dissident who won the Nobel Peace Prize.

But the truth is that nothing is untouchable for Vladimir Putin. On December 28, the Russian president had the prestigious Memorial association, founded by Sakharov more than thirty years ago, blocked by the supreme court. Memorial is accused of violating the laws on “foreign agents”. A second procedure was launched against another association linked to Memorial, the Center for the Defense of Human Rights.

It is yet another blow against Russian civil society, whose existence is jeopardized by the accelerated repression that has been going on for a year, or by the return home of the opponent Alexei Navalnyj, now in prison.

Selective rehabilitation
By blocking Memorial Putin wants to control the writing of the history of the Soviet Union, an entity that has disappeared for the past thirty years and whose collapse has been defined by the current Russian president as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”.

Putin has attacked an institution that has exposed the crimes of that Stalinism whose power he would like to restore, embodied by the victory over Nazism.

Memorial represented an obstacle on the path of selective rehabilitation of the USSR, in a “Putinian” vision that fixes the instruments of its absolute power in the imagination of Tsarist Russia and Stalinist warrior virility.

It is certainly no coincidence that the coup de grace struck at Memorial coincides with the tensions over Ukraine orchestrated by the Kremlin to obtain from Westerners the acceptance of the existence of a Russian sphere in the former Soviet space. A Russian-American meeting is scheduled for January 10 to discuss this claim by Putin, with clear historical reminiscences.

The ability of totalitarian regimes to control collective memory should not be underestimated. In this Putin is inspired by his Chinese friends, who through absolute control have managed to erase, generation after generation, the memory of the millions of deaths of Mao’s “great leap forward” in the 1950s or the victims of Tiananmen Square in 1989. .

But this maneuver doesn’t always work. Memorial’s first act after its foundation was to reveal to the Russian public the truth about the Katyn massacre, the extermination of thousands of Polish officers in 1940, long attributed to the Nazis by Soviet propaganda and which instead was the work of the NKVD. the secret police service of the Soviet interior ministry. Sakharov believed that it was not possible to build a free society based on lies.

In a petition signed last month, Michail Gorbachev, the last president of the USSR, and Dmitrij Muratov, a Russian journalist who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, also shared their “anguish” over the ban. by Memorial, adding that the work of preserving memory is useful to prevent the crimes of the past from repeating themselves, “today or tomorrow”.

Unfortunately, the alarm was ignored.

(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)