Russian President Vladimir Putin’s effort to eliminate one of the country’s oldest human rights organizations is the latest indication that the authoritarian leader has revived many Soviet-era practices to crush civil society and tighten his grip on power, including persecuting dissidents and disseminating anti-Western propaganda.
Russian state-owned media reported late last week that the Kremlin’s Justice Ministry has filed a lawsuit to dissolve the Russian Memorial Society. The group, known as Memorial, was founded in the latter years of the Soviet Union to document victims of political repression.
Memorial’s leaders say the government has targeted the organization since 2012, when Putin regained the presidency and signed a law requiring non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to register as "foreign agents" if they accept foreign money and engage in "political activity." Activists said the law was redolent of the Soviet government’s paranoia about Western saboteurs and Russian traitors. The Justice Ministry has since filed administrative suits against dozens of NGOs, forcing some of them to shut down, according to Human Rights Watch.
Memorial was one of five NGOs that the Justice Ministry involuntarily added to the foreign agents list in July. The groups must either submit numerous reports about their finances and activities to the government each year—which leaders say has a chilling effect—or face punitive fines that could force them to close.
Putin said in July that he would not crack down on civil society, but expressed concerns about the influence of foreign intelligence services on the Russian state.
"It is precisely from civil society that we expect active assistance in perfecting governance," he said during a meeting of the Russian Security Council. "And—this is particularly important—in the raising of our youths in spirit of patriotism and responsibility for the fate of their motherland."
Now the Justice Ministry says in its suit that Memorial’s decentralized leadership structure and regional branches violate Russian law. However, the group has operated with the same structure for several years and did not previously receive complaints from the ministry. The Russian Supreme Court will review Memorial’s case on Nov. 13.
State-run news outlets have already attempted to discredit Memorial as it prepares for the court case. State-owned NTV alleged last week that members of the group support "terrorism and extremism." The television network also referred to Memorial as the Human Rights Center, an affiliated organization that focuses more on contemporary human rights violations by Russian forces in separatist regions such as Chechnya.
"There were reports on television saying that the Justice Ministry wanted to liquidate the Memorial Human Rights Center, which is actually not the case," Lev Ponomaryov, one of the founders of Memorial, told The Moscow Times. "The Human Rights Center operates in hot spots like the Caucasus and its work is more controversial in the eyes of the leadership. But the organization they are actually going after—the Memorial Society—is essentially meant to keep the legacies of victims of Soviet-era repression alive."
Anna Borshchevskaya, a fellow at the European Foundation for Democracy, said in an interview that the Kremlin purposefully uses the term "extremism" to delegitimize its opponents.
"When [people in the West] say extremism, generally we think about someone who uses violence to achieve their aims, someone who really is a radical," she said. "But in Russia very often the term extremism is used by the regime to simply describe their enemy."
"The Kremlin likes to hype the danger of extremism to justify its own human rights abuses," she added.
Additionally, the Russian state and affiliated strongmen allegedly targeted some of Memorial’s members in the past. Natalia Estemirova, a former Memorial worker who documented abuses by Chechen law enforcement and security agencies in the town of Grozny, was abducted and killed in 2009. Estemirova’s family and colleagues suspected that Ramzan Kadyrov, a Kremlin-backed warlord and president of Chechnya, was behind her murder.
Analysts say Putin’s repression of civil society at home is likely to continue as Russian-backed forces seek to maintain control of separatist territory in eastern Ukraine. The Russian president signed a bill into law on Wednesday that will curtail foreign ownership of media assets, a measure that could threaten the few remaining independent news outlets in the country.
Borshchevskaya said the state targeting of Memorial, an organization dedicated to Soviet-era victims of persecution, is the latest indication that Russia has yet to face the "blood of its Soviet past."
"It’s one reason why Russia has never been able to become a democracy," she said. "It has never been able to move on from its Soviet past. It’s sort of trapped by it."