A court in Moscow has ordered the liquidation of a prominent NGO dedicated to preserving the memory of those who died under communist rule, after prosecutors said the group was seeking to rewrite the history of the Soviet Union.
In a ruling issued on Tuesday, a judge decreed that Memorial, already registered as a ‘foreign agent’ over its links to overseas funding, would no longer be able to operate in Russia after authorities said that it had repeatedly broken the law.
During the hearing, a representative of the Prosecutor General said that Memorial “was created as an organization to perpetuate historical memory, but now it is almost completely focused on distorting historical memory, primarily about the Great Patriotic War,” as WWII is known in Russia. According to the official, the group “creates a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state” and “attempts to whitewash and rehabilitate Nazi war criminals who have the blood of Soviet citizens on their hands… probably because someone is paying for this.”
Russia’s Ministry of Justice and its media regulator Roskomnadzor have both backed the claims from prosecutors, with a spokeswoman for the communications watchdog saying that “brazen and repeated violations of the law” had been “convincingly proven beyond question” ahead of the court ruling.
Memorial, which describes its mission as educating the public about repression during the Soviet period, was designated as a foreign agent in 2016 after authorities said that it had accepted funds from abroad to engage in domestic political activity. However, the group was handed a series of fines after judges said it had failed to follow requirements to display the label prominently. Citing “repeated and gross breaches” of the rules, prosecutors filed a request with the Russian Supreme Court for the organization to be dissolved in November.