Comment: From labeling to attacks on “foreign agents” in the Russian Federation | Comments from DW Reviewers and Guest Contributors | DW

Several dozen thugs in masks tried to disrupt the screening in the Moscow office of the Memorial center of the film by Polish director Agnieszka Holland “Gareth Jones”, dedicated to the Holodomor in Ukraine. Police arrived 15 minutes later and kept the human rights defenders in their office until early morning, treating them as if they were attackers, not victims. The next day, for sanitary reasons, Memorial moved its annual campaign, Returning Names, online.

From fines to threats of violence

The Memorial Human Rights Center was included in the register of organizations performing the functions of a foreign agent. The organization has been fined several times, and the total amount of fines has already exceeded several million rubles, which is a lot for human rights defenders who do not conduct any commercial activity and live on donations.

Ivan Preobrazhensky

The police have not yet figured out which forces are behind the current provocation. But NGOs, the media and individuals labeled as “foreign agents” have been subjected to pressure from the authorities in Russia for many years, as well as provocations from all sorts of gopniks. Thugs from the brigade of the writer and leftist politician Zakhar Prilepin, for example, have already besieged the office of Memorial.

In Moscow and other Russian cities, various cultural, completely non-political actions were repeatedly disrupted. More often it was the authorities – sometimes such groups of pseudomatriotic youth, but still not without an order. However, such a blatant threat of violence against ordinary viewers, not politicians, or even employees of an NGO-foreign agent, is clearly a new stage.

Those who broke into the Memorial office called everyone who had gathered in the hall “foreign agents”, demanded that they lie face down on the floor, raise their hands behind their heads, and offered to “get out to the West.” Many viewers say bluntly that they felt a direct threat to their health, and even life. And there is an unkind feeling that the attackers acted in conjunction with the police. Otherwise, why would the latter, upon arriving at the scene, engage in the same pressure on human rights defenders and spectators, and not investigate the attack?

This is a new stage in the chain of government pressure on “foreign agents” in Russia. Now the victim can be anyone who interacted with them.

Finish off Russian human rights defenders

I must say that this is not the end of yesterday’s story. The authorities seem to have decided to finally finish off Memorial. In the morning after the provocation, the chairman of the board of the organization Yan Raczynski was summoned to the department of economic security and combating corruption of the Ministry of Internal Affairs “to give explanations”. The police also demanded to provide a certificate of registration of “Memorial”, copies of statutory and constituent documents and other papers. Such a check is a quite possible path to recognition, on the basis of the provocation, committed the day before, of the human rights center as an “extremist organization” – following the headquarters of Navalny and the FBK.

The methods of struggle that were recently used against the political opposition in Russia are rapidly being transferred to civil society. By the way, it was not only “non-profit foreign agents” who were fined. The first administrative cases, which means that in the near future, fines were received by individuals, who were declared by the authorities to be “acting media-foreign agents.”

By the way, there are worse analogies. The Ministry of Internal Affairs also demanded from Memorial to provide a copy of Agnieszka Holland’s film, even though its screening was coordinated, according to Memorial, by the Foreign Ministries of Poland and Russia. It seems that they want to ban him or recognize him as extremist. Not for the first time in recent Russian history, of course.

A land of bad news?

That evening, when the masked thugs burst into the Memorial office and the police were operating there afterwards, the presentation of the first edition of the Michelin gastronomic guide dedicated to Russia took place in Zaryadye not far away. This is great news and great recognition of haute Russian cuisine in the world.

I would like to devote my column to this very thing, because who among us does not like to eat well. However, the hand does not go up. Because the opposition of Michelin stars to the Holodomor theme, old and new repressions, is too obvious here. And not in favor of the gastronomic guide and the visitors of the restaurants that got into it in Moscow.

Author: Ivan Preobrazhensky – Ph.D. in Political Science, an expert on Central and Eastern Europe, a columnist for a number of media outlets. Written a weekly column on DW. Ivan Preobrazhensky on Facebook: Ivan Preobrazhensky

The commentary expresses the personal opinion of the author. It may not coincide with the opinion of the Russian editorial staff and Deutsche Welle in general.

See also:

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  Monuments to the victims of communism

  Cz: memorial to the victims of communism

  Seven bronze sculptures descend down a white staircase at the foot of Petřín Hill in Prague. The memorial was opened in 2002 and is a joint work of the Czech sculptor Olbram Zubek and architects Jan Kerel and Zdenek Holzel. The memorial is dedicated, as the inscription says, not only to those who were “imprisoned or executed, but also to all those whose lives were destroyed by totalitarian despotism.”

• 

  Monuments to the victims of communism

  Germany: Memorial at Hohenschönhausen

  From 1951 to 1989, more than 11,000 people were imprisoned in the central pre-trial detention center of the GDR Ministry of State Security (“Stasi”). Prior to that, the brick building with basements in the Berlin district of Hohenschönhausen was used by the Soviet occupation authorities as a special camp for Nazis and alleged enemies of the communist regime.

• 

  Monuments to the victims of communism

  Romania: memory of the Resistance

  From the giant monument to Lenin, erected in 1960 in Bucharest on the square in front of the tallest building in Romania, built like “Stalin’s skyscrapers”, there is only one pedestal. On the initiative of former political prisoners, since 2016, this pedestal has a 20-meter-high obelisk by sculptor Mihai Buculei.

• 

  Monuments to the victims of communism

  Albania: “House of Leaves”

  The first memorial to the victims of the communist regime in Tirana appeared in 2017. During World War II, the German occupiers used the building as a prison. After the communists came to power in 1945, dissidents were tortured and killed here. Then behind the facades of the House of Leaves was the headquarters of Sigurimi, the secret service of Albania during the communist era.

• 

  Monuments to the victims of communism

  Russia: Solovetsky stone

  In Moscow, a monument to the victims of political repression in the USSR is located on Lubyanskaya Square. It was on the Lubyanka during the years of the Soviet dictatorship that documents were signed for the mass arrests of people who were accused of treason and anti-communism. The granite boulder was brought to Moscow from the Solovetsky Islands, from the village of Solovetsky, where in 1919-1933 there was a camp, and in 1937-1939 – a prison for special purposes.

• 

  Monuments to the victims of communism

  Georgia: Museum of Soviet Occupation

  In Stalin’s homeland in the Georgian city of Gori, the Soviet dictator is still considered a national hero, although there are plans to remodel the permanent exhibition in a museum dedicated to him. The Museum of Soviet Occupation, which opened in 2006 at the National Museum in Tbilisi, talks about political repressions and victims of the Soviet regime.

• 

  Monuments to the victims of communism

  Kazakhstan: Monument to the Victims of Famine

  About 1.5 million Kazakhs died as a result of the catastrophic famine caused by forced collectivization in 1932/33. The memory of the victims of the Kazakh Holodomor is honored by a monumental sculptural and artistic composition in Astana, unveiled on May 31, 2012, on the national day of remembrance for victims of political repression.

• 

  Monuments to the victims of communism

  Ukraine: a monument at the “Prison on Lontskoy”

  The monument to the victims of communist crimes in Lviv was opened in 1997. The place where it was installed is symbolic – opposite the former prison on Lontsky Street, in the building of which, in particular, the NKVD administration and the Gestapo investigatory prison were located. Since 2009, the National Museum of Memory of Victims of the Occupation Regimes has been operating here.

• 

  Monuments to the victims of communism

  Latvia: Freedom Monument

  Milda – this is what Latvians call a female figure on the 19-meter pylon of the Freedom Monument in Riga. The monument was erected in 1935 in memory of the fallen fighters for the independence of Latvia and survived the Soviet era thanks to the patronage of the architect Mukhina, a native of Riga. The monument is one of the unofficial symbols of Latvia and expresses the desire for self-determination, the will to protest and resistance.

• 

  Monuments to the victims of communism

  Mongolia: Memorial at the Museum of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression

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• 

  Monuments to the victims of communism

  Korea: “Freedom Bridge”

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• 

  Monuments to the victims of communism

  Cambodia: memory of the victims of the Khmer Rouge

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  Monuments to the victims of communism

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  Author: Marcel Fürstenau, Ella Volodina

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