“Peace for Ukraine, freedom for Russia”, read the banners that Memorial members displayed almost a year ago in the protests, quickly put down (with some 20,000 administrative cases opened by the Russian courts) against the invasion of Ukraine. The motto reappeared this week in Madrid, at an extraordinary meeting of this veteran Russian organization for the defense of historical memory and human rights. But the motto was only a framework, because the discourse has changed dramatically. It is not an abstract no to war, nor in the sense of “we don’t want our boys to die there”, but even the opposite, implicitly and heartbreakingly they assume that sacrifice: now Memorial calls for the victory of Ukraine.
Although personal opinions may be nuanced, Memorial’s message is that the defeat of Vladimir Putin may precipitate the end of his regime. They believe the Russian president is willing to go all the way, so “you have to help Ukraine win the war,” says Memorial CEO and co-founder Elena Zhemkova.
Memorial has been the conscience of Russia for three decades; has documented, in a file with three million names, the crimes of Stalinism, but also the wars in Chechnya, which have cost some of its members repression and jail, and even the life of Natalia Estemírova, assassinated in 2009, three years after the journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Last year, the most recognized Russian organization –and which has an international entity– was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, just shortly after being closed down by the Kremlin on charges of links to extremist and terrorist groups, and within the framework of the wave of repression that classifies any critical voice in Russia as a “foreign agent”.
The Memorial Meets in Madrid meeting had a special significance. Convened by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Cidob and the Rafael del Pino Foundation, for the first time in many months it brought together fifteen of its members, from inside and outside Russia, together with many other Spanish and European intellectuals.
In a first statement to a packed auditorium, Elena Zhemkova said that the Russian state “is out of control, it is a criminal state.” “Year after year there was talk that it would end badly; if the crimes are not punished, they end up leaving the country”. This time to Ukraine.
According to Zhemkova, a lot was done to remember the victims of the Soviet system – and those of Chechnya, it should be added. but the principle of justice for all and punishment of criminals “has failed.” A feeling of guilt afflicts the activists, and they exposed it that way. Memorial was dedicated to extensive documentation, but neither demanding nor vocal enough, which brings us to today.
“In the nineties we thought that we had overcome totalitarianism, that the ideology of the State had been prohibited, and we did not name what was coming,” says Nikita Petrov. The term “Putinism” does not quite catch on. In the words of Irina Scherbakova – who recalled Putin’s link with the old Russian structures pointed out by the writer Vladimir Sorokin – “the stinking corpse of our past was not moved out of our way, we covered it with rags, and the corpse rose, like a zombie. Precisely the letter Z – insignia of the Russian military campaign in Ukraine – is the letter of the zombie”.
Putin has seized memory and has been able to establish a direct connection between the Great Patriotic War and the one in Ukraine (the victory over Nazism continues to be the great political glue of Russian society, as if that victory did not include Ukrainians , Belarusians, Georgians and many more, then members of the USSR). “It sounds crazy but it’s not,” says Elena Zhemkova. When this tragedy began, no one discussed it, and I find good people, people who know me, my hairdresser, for example, saying: “My son is going to defend the country.”
“War is a botanical garden for propaganda,” says Nina Khrushcheva, professor of international relations at The New School in New York. But “today it is more difficult to fight Russian myths, propaganda. We had never been in a situation like this; what Putin is trying to do now is new.”
To do? The Madrid meeting was called in some way to close ranks between the diaspora and those who remain in Russia and can be arrested ten minutes after going out into the street, to overcome reproaches. “You have to help those who have left Russia, tell them that they are counted on,” says Elena Zhemkova. You can’t tell people not to be afraid, but they are not alone.”
Telling what is happening is going to be difficult, as is going to be “getting out of this abyss of moral catastrophe in which Russia finds itself”, according to Irina Sherbakova.
For now, there is a way to go, in which Memorial also has experience, and that is the documentation of war crimes in Ukraine (on one side and the other). The road will go through a complex network of legal instances and international treaties, and will have to lead to the prosecution of Vladimir Putin, even if it has no other result than turning him into an international pariah.
