The Russian state again wants to put everything under its control, and officials at different levels are happy to oblige. It's not just about politics or the economy. The state wants the history, and more broadly, the entire intellectual and spiritual life of society to be also under its control. Any serious alternatives are treated as a criminal offence. Living in Russia, having your own opinion and not being afraid to express it once again requires courage. For this, not only political but also civil activists are being imprisoned, and journalists and lawyers get branded with the shameful, in the eyes of the Kremlin, status of "foreign agents". A new round of repressions and public protests has been spiked by the state's attempt to liquidate the oldest human rights organization in contemporary Russia, which operates as two legal entities – International Memorial and the Memorial Human Rights Center.
The state's crackdown on civil society has been going on for several years. But it was the outgoing 2021 that became the milestone that allows us to talk about the "before" and "after".
The complete defeat of Alexei Navalny's organization, his arrest, and repressions against the heads of regional headquarters could be perceived as the destruction of political opponents.
Thirteen-year sentence in the maximum-security penal colony for a fabricated charge of pedophilia for the historian Yuri Dmitriev, who has dedicated his life to the victims of political repressions and has uncovered multiple firing ranges in Karelia, could be perceived as the settlement of personal scores by local security forces.
The persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in different regions of Russia, which has been going on for several years, could be perceived as a crackdown on religious cults.
There are many other stories. Together, they form various parts of one big process – a consistent, ongoing struggle of the modern Russian state against any forms of dissent. The fact that the struggle is all-encompassing is evidenced not only by repressions against Russian citizens, but also by constant attacks on the IT giants with demands to remove content from the Internet that the state does not like (in particular, calls to go to unauthorized rallies), and now the legislative requirement for those IT companies whose audience in Russia is more than half a million visitors a day to establish local headquarters subject to Russian regulations. It is a fight against the means of delivering content that are not yet state-controlled.
It is a dangerous exaggeration to believe that President Vladimir Putin is personally behind all the repressions. Perhaps this is true only in relation to Navalny.
Putin, as an aging president who has been in power for almost a quarter of a century, can no longer rule the country in "manual mode". But he has created a "system" that operates largely autonomously, guided only by a general framework of available actions. It is possible that the brutality of the security forces exceeds the cruelty that the Kremlin is ready to sanction, but since there are no consultations, the Kremlin post factum agrees with the level of cruelty that the security forces choose to employ. It is they who have now taken control of domestic politics in Russia.
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It can be argued that the post-Soviet identity in Russia has been formed, and it has acquired a neo-imperial form. At the same time, the basis for this identity has become a historical narrative, a turn to the past and, accordingly, vague ideas about the future. However, the time of great heroes who justify the existence of modern Russia in this narrative is not the distant past. This time is quite close to to us, the time of the Great Patriotic War, the time of the Soviet Union. This time should be carefully dissected and mythologized, and the state invests huge amounts of money in the propaganda of new interpretations of history, financing numerous "patriotic" films about Soviet heroes and paying for the creation of other pro-government content through state grants.
Considering all of the above, the source of the allegations of the security forces against the oldest public organization engaged in the search and rehabilitation of victims of Soviet political repressions and human rights activities becomes clearer. The formal reason for applying to the Supreme Court for the liquidation of International Memorial is several administrative protocols drawn up for Memorial's alleged violations of the law on "foreign agents", and to the Moscow City Court with the same demand against the Memorial Human Rights Centre for "persistent disregard for the law and gross violation of the rights of citizens." The lawsuit was filed by the Prosecutor General's Office and supported by the Ministry of Justice and the Russian Oversight Committee (Roskomnadzor). This configuration was supposed to show that this is not one agency settling scores with unwanted civil activists, but that the state authorities in the broad sense of the word no longer want to put up with the existence of a public organization that is engaged in preserving inconvenient historical memory.
In fact, the security forces do not hide it. Here is what prosecutor Alexei Zhafyarov said in his speech in the Supreme Court: "Memorial, speculating on the topic of political repressions of the twentieth century, creates a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state, whitewashes and rehabilitates Nazi criminals who have the blood of the Soviet citizens on their hands ... Why are we, the descendants of the victors, forced to watch the attempts to rehabilitate traitors to the motherland and Nazi accomplices? Probably because someone pays for it. And this is the real reason for the fierce rejection with which Memorial denies the status of a "foreign agent"[1]. ‘
It is irrelevant which particular state office has composed this speech. Its main theses clearly express the course taken by the authorities in Russia.
And the decisions of the courts, no matter how much we protest, no matter how much we hope for the best, are quite predictable. On December 28, the Supreme Court liquidated the human rights organization International Memorial. After the prosecutor's words, it took Judge Anna Nazarova only forty minutes to rule for the plaintiffs without any reservations. The next day, December 29, the Moscow City Court no less quickly decided to liquidate the Memorial Human Rights Center.
Just two days earlier, Yuri Dmitriev received additional two years in prison for the same trumped-up pedophilia charges. His total sentence now is 15 years.
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Both Dmitriev, whose trials have been ongoing since 2016, and International Memorial were supported by a variety of organisations and individuals. More than 130,000 people signed a petition in defense of Memorial.
However, among those who did not declare their full support for Memorial the Russian Orthodox Church should be mentioned among the first. It remained silent, although some clerics – as private individuals, as citizens – supported Memorial.
Unfortunately, the official Church chose a different path – to eloquently support the authorities on the one hand, and to maintain the equally eloquent silence on socially significant problems, on the other. The state "bought" the Church, and this turned out to be an expensive, but in the end a very profitable purchase. In exchange for grants, subsidies for the construction of spiritual centers, restoration projects and tax breaks, the Kremlin received the full ideological loyalty of the Patriarch, the episcopate and most of the clergy.
The official Church fully agreed with the state that history is preeminent. Not the complete history, of course, but only the historical narrative that asserts Russian statehood and the special role of the Church in its formation.
At the same time, the official Church experiences the biggest problems addressing the repressions and the role of the state in the destruction of the Church in the 1920-40s. The official Church is afraid to allow itself to say that the predecessors of the current security forces consistently physically destroyed bishops, priests, and laity precisely for the confession of faith.
Yes, the Church canonized more than 1,000 new martyrs and confessors who suffered during the years of persecutions. And yet, in an attempt to placate the authorities, the Church affirms: "The feat of the new martyrs and confessors testifies to their opposition to God-fighting, and not to the state as such." [2] This is a quote from a document adopted ten years ago, in much less dangerous times, at the Bishops' Council of the Russian Orthodox Church. I coordinated the work on this document, and these words were not part of the draft prepared by the working committee of the Inter-Conciliar Presence (SME) of the Russian Orthodox Church. The amendment was announced later at the plenary session of the SME, supported by the Patriarch and, accordingly, by the majority of voters.
The above words from a document of high canonical status negate many efforts to venerate the new martyrs. This veneration has not developed, it remains largely formal precisely because the official Church reluctantly and very timidly speaks about the reasons for the repressions and about those who directly participated in the persecutions.
The very concept of "defining" the new martyrs also looks rather contradictory. The Bolsheviks carried out social genocide against the clergy and active members of religious communities. However, there was also social genocide against other social groups, i.e. nobility and peasants. Does it make sense to put them in another "category"? And the back and forth associated with "un-canonization", the deletion of several dozen names from the saints, does not add confidence that the path chosen by the Church will stand the test of time.
The secular approach chosen by Memorial, at least from a moral point of view, seems more convincing: not to divide the dead into the "holy" and "unholy", but to talk about the victims of repression as a kind of community where all the innocent victims are worthy of our memory.
Thirty years after the beginning of the "church revival" in post-Soviet Russia, a paradoxical situation has developed: the institutions of civil society have a higher moral authority than the official Church.
And it cannot be said that this is the result of secularization. Rather, on the contrary, it is the result of society's conscious demand for moral authority, which is associated with service in the highest sense of the word. But neither the state nor the Church, which firmly associated itself with it, could not respond to this request.
And Memorial could. I bow to all who have worked and are working in this beautiful organization. You are the true asset of Russia, and I have no doubt that you will find legal ways to continue working.
[1] Cit. along: https://meduza.io/news/2021/12/28/genprokuratura-utverzhdaet-chto-memorial-sozdaet-lzhivyy-obraz-sssr-kak-terroristicheskogo-gosudarstva