Offices closed, activities stopped, an entire movement outlawed by Putin’s Russia. Memorial continues to defend political prisoners and hopes for victory for Ukraine as a condition for another Russia.

We talk about this with Giulia De Florio, president of Memorial Italia, translator and lecturer at the University of Parma.

What is Memorial?

Memorial was founded in the second half of the 1980s by a group of Soviet dissidents and citizens who were determined to come to terms with the repressive Soviet past and to restore a name to the victims of Stalinism. In 1987, the ‘Group for the Preservation of the Memory of the Victims of Soviet Repression’ was formed in Moscow, which in a few years expanded into a widespread movement.

‘It was born where the archives are, and the archives are where the camps were,’ Giulia explains. Also in Ukraine and, over the years, in other European countries such as Germany and Italy. “The gulags are not just a Soviet experience, they are a European experience that contributes to determining identity.”

Almost 1,200 Italians died in the gulags, most of them anarchist and communist exiles who fled fascism, seeking a bright future in the USSR.

In 2022 Memorial received the Nobel Peace Prize together with Belarusian human rights defender Ales Bialiatski and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, ‘for their efforts to represent civil society and document crimes of power in three countries at war or under authoritarian rule’.

From the beginning, Memorial holds two threads together: historical research on gulags and mass shootings and the defence of human rights in the present. It starts with the new crises to follow and the conflicts in the former Soviet republics. It fights, memory is not enough to preserve.

How does it work in practice?

Memorial activists deal with statistics and monitoring, with some cases of direct intervention, such as that of Sergey Kovalev, who played a mediating role in Chechnya, even offering himself as a hostage.

Alongside this, what Memorial has done in Russia so far is above all legal assistance to political prisoners and their families, and dialogue with international human rights institutions.

The activity of Memorial is possible thanks to the leverage of the formal features of the law, however unjust and inconsistent, still present in Russia. Within the narrow confines of this law, with a conviction rate of 99.97%, it still makes sense to provide a lawyer to defendants. In the defence of seemingly lost cases, one preserves the person and the hope for a different Russia tomorrow.

“There isa real impact, small successes that sometimes only take a few months off the sentence or improve prison conditions or in some cases avoid torture.”

Not only that, Giulia explains, ‘it also works in a preventive sense, the presence of a lawyer and the NGO discourages overkill’.

Letters to political prisoners and the collection of last words

He also cites the initiative of writing letters to prisoners as a tangible effect. “Writing to prisoners means keeping attention on that specific person. An abandoned person is at the mercy of anyone. Who will be close to the Russian pensioner in jail for making a donation to the Ukrainian army?”

In 2022, Memorial Italia published ‘Protect My Words’, Edizioni E/O. It collects twenty-five last statements, which in Russia today can still be made without limitation or censorship before sentencing, made by people who have become political prisoners.

“Some take that moment as their forum”, only they can say “war sucks”, in that moment they are “freer than the same judge who is judging them”. The collection also includes minors, journalists, pussy riots, lawyers, ‘a whole society’.

Recent Developments

In early April, a motion was submitted to the Russian Ministry of Justice. The document demands that ‘the international Memorial movement be recognised as an extremist organisation’.

In Russia, this list includes the FBK fund, the Russian LGBT+ movement, Satanists, separatists and so on.

On 9 April, the hearing took place behind closed doors, in a trial where no one had access to the documents kept sealed with the words ‘Secret’, and after a couple of hours, the verdict.

‘None of us had any illusions‘

Memorial will therefore soon be included in a public online list of organisations whose activities and members can be persecuted. Not only them, “today anyone with a Memorial pin on their backpack can be prosecuted in Russia for aiding and abetting an extremist organisation”.

Illiberal law thus conceived leaves almost total room for interpretation to the authorities. It is precisely this confusion that any dictatorial power seeks from legal authority.

Today, all Memorial offices in Russia were closed and all activity stopped. Raising the issues of Memorial is increasingly dangerous, ‘the regime wants suspicion and silence’ in the Soviet tradition.

But here Giulia responds with the phrase of the Russian poet Osip Mandel’štam: ‘If they continue to resent us, it is because we have done something good’. It is a bittersweet joke, but also the simplest way of saying that as long as power fears memory, Memorial’s work makes sense.

What does this mean for Memorial Italy and what is the position on the war on Ukraine?

For Memorial Italy, this means continuing with greater commitment, ‘we have to do it for those people who can no longer do it’.

The goal is to look at those resistant parts of society and interact with them, ‘the more inhuman a government is, the more civil society must humanise’. Giulia speaks of democracy as a muscle, ‘we have to train that society in democracy’.

“Russian society can only change if Ukraine maintains its territorial integrity,” he continues. Referring to the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, he adds that ‘there is also an organisation in Ukraine of the Memorial network’.

This is a hopeful sign, ‘our position is one: Ukraine must win this war that started in 2014 and expanded in 2022, the last piece of an imperialist policy that Putin has put at the foundation of his regime’.

Thinking about the post-Putin era is indispensable for Memorial, ‘if there are no subjects who take care of citizens, a healthy relationship between state and population will not be possible’.

The banning of Memorial as an extremist organisation not only closes a chapter in Russian civil society, it attempts to erase the idea that the truth about past and present repressions is a citizens’ right.