A week in Russia: “The great sin”
I’m Steve Gutterman, a reporter for RFE/RL’s Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.
Welcome to The Week In Russia, where I discuss the key events in Russian politics and society during the past week and look to the future. Click to receive The Week In Russia newsletter in your inbox here.
Amid relentless attacks on Ukraine, which received promises of US and German tanks, the Russian state relaunched its campaign against civil society at home as a court ordered the closure of a respected human rights group and authorities tightened Sakharov’s vise. Center, an important Moscow institution dedicated to promoting historical truth, fundamental freedoms and civil society.
Here are some of the most important events in Russia this past week and some things to watch out for.
“Destroy So Easily”
Russia’s war against Ukraine tends to grab the headlines and dominate the conversation about these two countries on a daily basis, which is only natural. Every day there are major events: fierce fighting on the front lines, deadly Russian bombing of cities far from the front lines, and complex discussions about how to support Kiev in the West, Europe and North America.
But this deluge of information, much of it blood-curdling, often obscures major developments within both countries, even if they stem directly or indirectly from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
As an example: In Russia, there was a key court decision, which in peaceful times would have attracted much more attention. But with Russia starting up new attacks after the strike on the apartment building killed at least 46 people in the city of Dnipro earlier this month, and in the spotlight of broadcast promises German and US tanks For Ukraine, the verdict was just part of a devastating drumbeat in the background of a war whose end is not in sight, but whose outcome is decisive for the future of the world.
The Moscow City Court ordered the Ministry of Justice to close the application Helsinki Group of Moscow (MHG), Russia’s oldest human rights organization and one of its most respected.
The Jan. 25 decision was just one of many blows—albeit a big one—in the Kremlin’s vaunted efforts to dismantle civil society, a campaign that began long before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine last February but has intensified ever since.
“You are committing a great sin,” MHG chairman Valery Borshtsov told the court.
While the decision was by no means unexpected, Borshchev suggested it was still a shock – like many things state officials have said and done both inside and outside of Russia.
“The ease with which you decide our fate amazes me,” the veteran human rights activist said. “How is it possible to destroy so easily what has been built over decades?”
MHG was founded in the 1970s by famous Soviet dissidents such as Yuri Orlov, Lyudmila Alekseeva, Andrei Amalrik, Natan Sharansky and Yelena Bonner in the Moscow apartment of the legendary rights activist and rights activist. physicist Andrei Sakharov.
Alekseeva led the group from 1996 until her death, aged 91, in 2019. President Vladimir Putin visited Alekseeva at her Moscow apartment on her 90th birthday in 2017 and expressed his “gratitude” to her and MHG for their “significant contribution to the strengthening of democratic institutions and civil society” in Russia.
Also since 1996 a two-story building near that apartment in eastern Moscow is the Sakharov Center, a museum and cultural institution dedicated to his legacy, preserving the memory of Soviet totalitarianism and the struggle for freedom, and promoting human rights and civil society in Russia.
“Foreign agents” and “undesirables”
The Sakharov Center has been a focal point for human rights defenders. In 2015, thousands of mourners flocked there to pay their last respects to a murdered opposition politician Boris Nemtsovwhose body lay in an open coffin and made a solemn procession to the cemetery for burial.
Similar ceremonies have also been held there for other human rights activists and critics of the Kremlin, such as Sergei Kovalev and Valeria NovodvorskayaWell-known foreign persons such as Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik have spoken in the center.
The Russian government branded the Sakharov Center a “foreign agent” in 2014, then using a new tool to suppress civil society and suppress dissent.
This week, the center reported that Moscow authorities, under a new version of the legislation on foreign agents, will divest the organization of its main building and Sakharov’s former apartment, which houses his archives, as well as the leases on another property.
In opinion The Sakharov Center said on January 26 that the measure “shows once again that the goal of state policy is the destruction of independent organizations defending public interests.”
The center said it received the eviction letter on Jan. 24, a day after Russia’s attorney general’s office labeled the US-based Andrei Sakharov Foundation (ASF) an “undesirable organization” in Russia, using another legal instrument of the Putin government. used against civil society groups.
The government swung the same gavel this week at Medusa, a Latvian news channel that publishes in Russian and English and focuses on Russia and other former Soviet republics. The “undesirable” designation came two years after Meduza was listed as a foreign agent.
The designation is part of “a full-scale war on media freedom that Putin has been waging since the beginning of his presidency,” Meduza co-founder and executive director Galina Timchenko said. Current timea Russian-language network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
“We will continue to work as we have been doing,” he said.
“Myths Based on Fear”
The ASF said it saw no reason for “this sudden adversarial action” and added: “We will of course continue our peaceful work.”
To some visitors who have gone there to listen to lectures or see exhibits on subjects such as the killing of millions of civilians during the Stalin era, the Sakharov Center has seemed like an exotic island — a place of damning information about the past and present. is clearly on display as the state steps up its efforts to hide the truth and distort history.
Organization severely criticized Putin’s government on the large-scale invasion of Ukraine shortly after it began last February, saying it was causing “death, destruction and immeasurable suffering in a neighboring country” and referring to the “moral bankruptcy of our society”.
It was confused by the Kremlin again in a new statement.
“An unchecked power that corrupts society with myths based on fear, hatred and a false sense of superiority, a power that manipulates real and imagined national traumas, cynically exploiting even the highest emotions of the people, will inevitably follow a path of oppression, lawlessness, destruction and bloodshed,” it said. “Saharov warned about this, and we are seeing it with our own eyes today.”
That’s it from me this week. If you want to know more, check out my podcast The Week Ahead In Russia, which comes out every Monday, here on our website or wherever you get podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts).
Your,
Steve Gutterman