Moscow News
www.mnweekly.ru
March 27, 2009
Memory quiz getting tougher
By Anna Arutunyan
In some respects Memorial, the research and human rights society that tracks victims of Stalinist repression, is doing all right.
There are not that many oppressive laws that directly prevent its researchers and rights advocates from doing their work, as most current legislation differs little from the liberal 1990s - and its cosy, well-kept Moscow office is bustling with activity. There are books to be published, documents to be read, people to be consulted.
Even in the case that has sparked a huge row - when prosecutors raided Memorial's St. Petersburg office in December - things may seem to be going the society's way. A court has finally ruled that Memorial's databases were confiscated illegally, while the attention that the raid brought case has actually translated into more donations, one member said.
But beneath the surface, all is not well for Memorial. Attitudes at various levels of officialdom toward the society have hardened in recent years as the willingness to uncover Soviet-era skeletons (and allow probing human rights campaigns) has receded.
And the March 20 court ruling on the St. Petersburg raid isn't seen as a victory by many of the society's activists, because the raid was only judged to be illegal on a procedural technicality - not on the principle of the security services taking away such sensitive research material.
"A lot has changed in the last 10 years, but not in the rules themselves," said Nikita Petrov, a member of the Moscow branch of Memorial who regularly works with archives held by the Federal Security Service. His line of work involves "everything you wanted to know about the repressions but were afraid to ask," he said.
But according to Petrov, many researchers today are becoming afraid to ask.
"There is certainly a new mentality," he said. "Researchers are afraid of asking, while the officials involved in granting access are suddenly finding new excuses to say no. They say the 1990s were a free-for-all, but now everything has to be re-checked and re-registered."
In Memorial's Moscow office, a woman asked permission to look through their vast archive of letters and documents pertaining to repression victims. Those seeking information about someone who was shot can obtain a fact sheet printed out on a Memorial brochure.
For names that cannot be found in Memorial's databases, Alyona Kozlova, the archive director, suggests that a formal request be addressed to the central FSB directorate on Lubyanka Ploshchad. Down the hall, a tiny museum features a collection of artwork and artifacts made by Gulag prisoners.
Memorial finds itself in a strange position today. Often cited as a shining example of a human rights organisation working in difficult conditions, the organisation is frequently asked to give comments to foreign media when a journalist is seeking a critical view of the authorities.
At home, as a group that gets grants from international foundations, it has been the target of ideological campaigns from ultranationalists and self-styled patriots claiming their verbal attacks are in line with Kremlin policy.
Lost in the ideological crossfire is the real work that Memorial's various offices across Russia have been doing for the last two decades. With increasing frequency, they are the ones that bear the brunt when Russia's sprawling bureaucracy goes awry.
December's raid was a case in point. But members of the St. Petersburg branch of Memorial cringe when the story is presented as part of some Kremlin conspiracy.
"So men from the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General's Office came in and had this masked show," said Tatyana Kosinova, a staff member at St. Petersburg Memorial's research department. "They raid us, take our Winchesters [hard drives]. And then two months later a court rules that the raid was illegal. The prosecutors appeal the ruling. Then the court rules in our favour again. All this time, we were heavily covered by the local press."
If anything, Kosinova said, the incident shows independence in the court system and the media reporting freely.
Asked about the motives for the raid, Kosinova cited colleagues who believed it might have been an arbitrary case of an investigator getting too ambitious. The official pretext for the investigation, after all, was an alleged connection to the Novy Peterburg newspaper, which was closed for publishing allegedly extremist materials.
Rather than being a single organisation, Memorial is a network that unites autonomous centres across the country. The society has three main goals: Creating a historical memory of the crimes committed by the Soviet regime through research and publications, social support for the victims of Stalinist repression and their relatives, and human rights advocacy on behalf of victims of present-day rights violations. As such, the view from different centres - and from different departments - can differ markedly.
"If we were talking somewhere in the provinces, in Kimry, for instance, we would be having an entirely different conversation," said Boris Belenkin, research director in the Moscow office of Memorial. He was sitting in a separate smoking area of the office's stairwell, furnished with the kind of table and chairs you would find in one of Moscow's fashionable literary cafes. The stairwell itself doubles as an exhibit hall, while the office contains a museum and several library rooms.
Belenkin acknowledged that Moscow's Memorial enjoys a considerable advantage over colleagues who have to work in the provinces. Remote regional branches get less financing and media attention, and are among the first victims of bureaucracy even as they carry out the work of uncovering repression in the Gulag.
A law signed in 2006, for instance, introduced stricter financing rules for NGOs - they would now have to be re-registered. The law appeared to be a direct attempt to regulate foreign financing of Russian NGOs, something that then-President Vladimir Putin said could be used as a tool of foreign policy.
"You saw our library, you saw our office. We have five or six accountants," Belenkin said. "So it's more difficult to get us for something. But take Tomsk, for instance. They can't get re-registered, they don't have money, they don't have a lawyer, and they don't have an accountant."
Various methods are used by regional authorities looking to hassle small Memorial centres, said Belenkin. A major problem, he said, was finding an office to rent: landlords in a city simply get a direct signal from administration officials not to have anything to do with Memorial.
"Extremism, foreign funds, Orange revolutions - we may smile at that here in Moscow," said Belenkin. "But far away, this is how many officials actually think. The barriers they set up are impossible. Sometimes, the only way out is to purchase a building. But that costs a lot of money."
Kosinova, Belenkin's colleague in St. Petersburg, disagreed. "If you blame the government every time you have a problem, then what is the whole point of human rights activity?"
Kosinova, who says that the St. Petersburg centre has actually received more donations since the crisis hit, admits that archive work has become more difficult.
Alyona Kozlova, director of Memorial archives in Moscow, says that information in the FSB archive that used to be open is frequently no longer granted. Not because of new regulations, or orders from the top. But because signals - and people - have changed.