On April 9, Russia's Supreme Court in Moscow declared the Memorial society an extremist organization, banning its activities nationwide.

The decision was expected. It is the latest step in a long series of actions by Russian authorities to destroy an organization that worked for decades to expose political repression in the Soviet Union and Russia, preserving the memory of victims.

First came the designation as a "foreign agent," then the closure of Memorial's legal entities in 2021–2022. Under current conditions, anyone in Russia linked to Memorial's activities risks criminal prosecution.

The organization's unique archive

During the Soviet Union's collapse, Memorial became the central institution for unveiling and interpreting Russia's repressive historical legacy. One might say that it functioned as a national conscience. Memorial systematized and preserved an enormous amount of information about political prisoners. At its Moscow headquarters, archive shelves were crammed with paper-filled folders and historically significant objects. These included items connected to Estonia — for example, materials related to painter Ülo Sooster.

Memorial's archive was largely built on donations from the families of the repressed. "On these shelves are documents that people have brought to us," said former Memorial Chairman Arseny Roginsky in 2013, showing the organization's main building to members of the Estonian parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee. "Mostly letters from the camps, memoirs. An endless stream of documents connected with the Gulag. There are very, very many of them."

Among the figures involved at Memorial's origins in the late Soviet years was scientist Andrei Sakharov. One of the best-known stories about the organization tells how, after the famous dissident died in 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev asked Sakharov's widow, Yelena Bonner, what could be done to help her. Bonner asked that Memorial be registered as a public organization. And so it happened (earlier, Sakharov had unsuccessfully attempted to secure registration).

The saga of Memorial's closure and destruction vividly illustrates the moral bankruptcy prevailing in Russia in 2026. Moscow authorities have built a society in which repression and the silencing of public criticism increasingly resemble the Stalinist and stagnation-era periods that Memorial was originally established to study. There are no "troikas" and mass nighttime executions by truck headlights — at least not yet. But reports that have emerged, even about the "zeroing out" of men sent into the meat grinder of the war in Ukraine, sound just as horrifying, if more absurd.

The fate of a contemporary Ivan Denisovich

In the history of Russian political repression, one literary figure carries powerful symbolic meaning: Ivan Shukhov, the camp inmate from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1962 novella "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (published in Estonian in 1963 in "Loomingu Raamatukogu," translated by Lennart Meri and Enn Sarv).

Shukhov's story is precisely the kind of saga whose real-life counterparts Memorial worked meticulously to document. The protagonist is captured by the Germans during the war but manages to escape and return to his own side — only to be accused of espionage. Drawing on Solzhenitsyn's own experiences, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" portrays the harsh daily routine of a labor camp, along with the tiny pleasures the protagonist manages to experience during the day: a job done well at a construction site, a portion of porridge obtained. It is almost a happy day because he was not thrown into solitary confinement, did not fall ill and did not have to go hungry.

If we were to move Denisovich from the mid-20th century into the present day, the story might unfold quite differently. A man like Shukhov would likely have been recruited from behind barbed wire into Yevgeny Prigozhin's Wagner private army at the height of its popularity and his bones would probably be bleaching somewhere in eastern Ukraine, amid the ruins of Bakhmut.

Or those earthly remains, sealed in a black plastic bag, might one day have reached Shukhov's home region of Polomna. Local authorities would have organized a funeral and a notice in the district newspaper would have added another entry to the statistics compiled by Mediazona together with the BBC. At present, that database already lists the names of more than 208,000 Russian soldiers killed in the war. Incidentally, the surname Shukhov appears there five times, borne by men aged 21 to 56 (though not a single Ivan Denisovich).

History never repeats itself in exactly the same way. Still, it is not impossible that someday in the future Russia will again be ruled by a figurative Nikita Khrushchev or Gorbachev whose era is remembered as a thaw and when criticism of past leaders is once more permitted. Some organization or social media collective would then pick up Memorial's baton and begin investigating the repression of the Ukraine war era. The field of work would be vast — there's no denying that.

--

Follow ERR News on Facebook and X and never miss an update!