In Russia, the repression against the Nobel Peace Prize organization in 2022 Memorial and its activists has intensified, as evidenced by several incidents that have occurred in recent days, reported by Memorial Italia, which show a particular attention by the agents for the archives of local branches of the association which was forced to close before the start of the war against Ukraine. Furthermore, yesterday the Tass agency announced the start of a criminal proceeding against an unidentified member of Memorial. The procedure is linked to the presence, in Memorial’s database of victims of Stalinism (which includes 3.5 million biographies), of 19 biographies of collaborators of the Germans during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The accusation of “rehabilitation of Nazism”, formalized against unspecified employees of the organization, comes from the Association of Russian Veterans.
Between Saturday and Monday, a series of searches, arrests and arrests of Memorial activists in Perm in connection with the transfer of the organization’s archive, after the headquarters had already closed in 2022. Security forces contacted on the phone one of the volunteers asking him to leave the house, they forcibly pushed him into the car and took him to the Center for Combating Extremism where he was held for 48 hours. During the “conversation” he was asked about Robert Latypov, former director of Memorial Perm, currently abroad. The agents gained access to his phone and forced him to write some messages to Latypov in his own name, in an attempt to acquire sensitive information related to the Perm Memorial archive. They took him to court on Monday, where he was fined 3,000 rubles on a fabricated charge of resisting a public official. From the court he was taken back to his apartment, where he kept the documents of the organization after the closure of the city office. About twenty agents took everything they could from the apartment: books, documents, the panels of the traveling exhibitions created by the association in recent years, and seized equipment and electronic devices.
Aleksandr Černyšov, director of the Perm Historical Memory Center, was also arrested on Saturday and taken to the Center for Combating Extremism. After an interrogation, the agents searched his apartment, again seizing all electronic devices. On Sunday, the headquarters of the Historical Memory Center underwent an inspection and the hard drives and computers were confiscated. (continued)
While carrying out all these “operations”, the agents did not provide any orders or copies of the records of the searches, “inspections” and interrogations. No one had a chance to call their lawyers. The agents of the “E Center” (the center for extremism) were particularly interested in the transfer of the archive to Moca, after the closure of Memorial Perm.
Also on Monday, following an anonymous complaint, Memorial Ekaterinburg, evicted from its offices, was subject to a police check while the documents, including the archive, were transferred to the new headquarters. On 23 June Memorial Ekaterinburg had been the subject of a long search, during which the special forces of the Omon had seized a series of documents.
Memorial Ekaterinburg was forced to leave the premises it had been renting for many years last December. On Monday, the activists finished packing the boxes and, when they were about to take them away, the police stopped one of the vans. “Someone anonymously called the police claiming that the car we had rented was carrying stolen things. The police stopped the car and took it to the station. I went there too, they interrogated me, they inspected the car, they opened the parcels that we had spent a month and a half preparing. They contained books from our library and other materials. The policemen found nothing illegal and let us go,” said Alexey Mosin, president of Memorial Yekaterinburg.
The trial of Michail Kriger, an activist and member of Memorial Podmoskove, who faces 7 years in prison for having, according to the indictment, supported terrorism, began on Monday at the military court in Moscow. He is charged with two counts of justifying terrorism and inciting hatred in connection with a Facebook post dedicated to anarchist Mikhail Zhlobitsky who blew himself up at the FSB headquarters in Archangelsk. “We are originally from Dnepropetrovsk (present-day Dnipro, in Ukraine, ed), so for us the bombing of a house in the area was a terrible tragedy. Michael and I were arrested while singing the anthem of Ukraine near the memorial to the victims of the bombing,” his brother testified.
There was then “yet another hostile act” against Yuri Dmitriev in the penal colony in Mordovia where he is serving a 15-year sentence due to totally unfounded accusations of pedophilia. Inmates of the colony are only allowed to receive 2 parcels of 20 kg each from home. When his glasses broke, Dmitriev asked if he could get a new pair by snail mail. The prison directors have forced him to use one of the two possibilities to receive basic necessities from home, against the prison regulation which establishes that ordinary mail is used for basic necessities. Dmitriev will therefore be able to receive only one more package during the year.