Kremlin Plans to Declare Memorial Extremist ‘Part of General Trend’ to Crush All Independent Groups and Normalize Repression, Cherkasov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 29 – On April 9, the Russian Supreme Court will hear a suit by the justice ministry to call Memorial and all its branches an extremist organization. There can be little doubt what the decision will be because this is “part of a general trend” to destroy independent social organizations and normalize repression, Aleksandr Cherkasov says.

            This can best be described as a reversal of perestroika and of the work of dissidents at the end of Soviet times who sought to create a societal consensus that “Soviet power  was based on repressions and that such a basis of governance is something abnormal and must not exist,” the longtime Memorial activist says (vot-tak.tv/92349158/zapret-memoriala-v-rossii).

            Russian government efforts to break the consensus the dissidents had created began in the mid-1990s as part of the Yeltsin regime’s efforts to “seize he agenda of the communists and national patriots” and involved both regular celebrations of victory day and the launching of the first Chechen war.

            When Vladimir Putin came to power, he expanded this effort to reverse the memory of the past, a change, Cherkasov says, most prominently symbolized by the shift in how Russians thought about the Great Patriotic War. Earlier, most believed that memory of that conflict meant that it must never happen again. Now, Putin promoted the notion that “we can do it again.”

            Then, the current leader pushed for laws that allowed his regime to declare whole groups extremist or worse and then take action against anyone cooperating with them without having to show that the individual charged had actually done anything. That is the method Stalin used; and now Putin is using exactly the same today.

            “Such changes of the conception of memory regarding the past Soviet terror are part of the politics of the normalization of repression as a method of rule now,” Cherkasov continues. New laws about fakes about the army represent precisely a return to Soviet laws about disseminating false information or conducting anti-Soviet propaganda.

            But what is especially worrisome, the Memorial activist says, is that such an approach normalizes repression now as a means of rue. “’Yes, under Stalin or under Brezhnev,’ it is possible that someone was falsely arrested, but on the whole everything was done correctly!” – that is the message this transformation of memory of the past sends.

            According to Cherkasov, the Putin regime much like its Stalinist predecessor is going through four stages in describing its opponents: first as foreign agents, then as undesirables, then as extremists, and finally as terrorists. “We now are between the third and the fourth,” with movement continuing in the wrong direction.

            Such categorizations not only save time for investigators, prosecutors and judges but make it easier and easier for the regime to crush anyone who doesn’t hew to its line, Cherkasov says, again, just as was the case in Stalin’s time. Everyone needs to recognize what is happening; and those who can must resist in ways that do the least harm to those who oppose such things.