Prominent historians and human rights activists were shocked by a Russian Supreme Court ruling Tuesday to close Memorial International, which chronicled historical abuses of the former Soviet Union and identified victims of former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s purges. 

 

The human rights group, which has long drawn the ire of Russian officials, was found guilty of breaking a law requiring nongovernmental organizations and other groups to register as foreign agents if they receive foreign donations. Kremlin critics said the organization was targeted for political reasons. 

 

Memorial International’s sister organization, the Memorial Human Rights Center, which campaigns on behalf of political prisoners in modern-day Russia, is also under legal threat. Prosecutors in Moscow Wednesday will call for its closure on claims it has been justifying terrorism and condoning extremism in its publications. 

“A power that is afraid of memory, will never be able to achieve democratic maturity,” Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum director Piotr Cywiński tweeted on Tuesday. Other historians said on social media that the ruling capped a year of crackdowns on Kremlin critics not seen since the Soviet days. 

 

In a joint statement, the German branch of Amnesty International, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation decried the ruling, saying the Russian government “wants to monopolize individual and collective memory.” 

Uncovering atrocities 

 

Memorial International has chronicled the horrors of the Communist era since it was co-founded in 1987 by Nobel laureate and Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, four years before the end of the Soviet Union. Memorial historians located execution sites and mass graves of Stalin’s “Great Terror,” also known as the “Great Purge,” and tried to identify as many victims as possible. 

 

Several historians associated with Memorial International have been imprisoned in recent years, including Karelia-based gulag chronicler Yury Dmitriyev, who this week was sentenced to 15 years in a penal colony for allegedly abusing his adopted daughter.

Other historians say the charge against Dmitriyev was trumped up and leveled to silence him. Two other Gulag chroniclers also have been jailed on sex-related charges. 

 

Historical memory 

 

Kremlin authorities repeatedly have accused Memorial International of distorting history. Before Tuesday’s ruling, state prosecutor Alexei Zhafyarov said, “It is obvious that Memorial creates a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state.” Zhafyarov claimed the extensive lists of victims of Stalinist repression compiled by the organization also included “Nazi offenders with blood of Soviet citizens on their hands.” 

 

“This is why we, the descendants of (WWII) victors, are forced to watch for attempts to rehabilitate traitors of the motherland and Nazi collaborators,” he added. 

 

Stalin’s image has slowly been rehabilitated since Vladimir Putin came to power in the late 1990s, a rehabilitation that has included new statues and memorials being built, and officials no longer embarrassed to hang Stalin’s portraits.

 

Memorial historians say they are on the front line in a battle over history and the chronicling of the communist past.

 

“The very act of remembrance is frowned on,” St. Petersburg-based historian Anatoly Razumov told VOA in a recent interview. He said officials under Putin see the memorializing as unpatriotic, an act undertaken by fifth columnists to the benefit of Western foes. 

 

Razumov said researching the Great Terror has always been difficult, even during the thaw years (the period after Stalin’s death in 1953) of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, Putin’s predecessor. He said 1997 marked the beginning of the end of the thaw when it comes to the history of the Great Terror. In a presidential decree, Yeltsin declared 1997 as the Year of Reconciliation. 

 

“After 1997, the topic was meant to go quiet. As far as the authorities were concerned, the topic was finished,” Razumov told VOA. 

 

Memorial historians say Kremlin-backed academics have put a lot of effort into adding details to the story of the horrors that Russia endured during World War II at the hands of the German Nazis. 

 

Last year, Russian prosecutors summoned surviving Red Army veterans to recall their battlefield experiences to help identify Nazis and their collaborators who carried out war atrocities in the Soviet Union. 

The probe was linked by some observers to Putin’s renewed interest in historical memory. The Russian leader and former KGB officer has complained loudly that the Soviet Union’s huge wartime role and its losses have been downplayed for propaganda purposes by Western politicians and historians. 

 

Putin has asserted Western popular culture overlooks Soviet sacrifices and focuses instead on events such as the Normandy landings of 1944. Some Western historians sympathize with Putin’s claim and his insistence the Soviet sacrifice in lives and treasure was much greater than the Western allies. But they question Putin’s rigid selectivity. 

 

Timothy Snyder, a Yale University historian and author of “The Road to Unfreedom,” has accused Putin of taking “certain points from the past to portray them as moments of righteousness” while everything in between those moments is discarded. 

 

Last year, Putin labeled those who disagree with the Kremlin’s version of history as Western “collaborators.” And the Investigative Committee of Russia has established a department to investigate “falsifications of history,” which rights campaigners and historians fear will be used to further stifle free inquiry. 

 

United Nations Special Rapporteur Mary Lawlor warned last month any dissolution of Memorial would be “a new low for human rights defenders in Russia,” whose “criticism of historical and contemporary human rights abuses has for many years made them the target of a government that is ever diminishing the space for public debate.” 
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Mali’s military government has denied hiring Russian mercenaries from the controversial Wagner Group, which has been sanctioned by the European Union for rights abuses. France and 15 other Western nations last week condemned what they said was Russia’s deployment of Wagner fighters to Mali. Mali’s transitional government says it is only engaged with official Russian military trainers. Analysts weigh in on Russia’s military involvement in Mali as French troops are drawing down.

Mali’s transitional government this month denied what it called “baseless allegations” that it hired the controversial Russian security firm the Wagner Group to help fight Islamist insurgents.  

Western governments and U.N. experts have accused Wagner of rights abuses, including killing civilians, in the Central African Republic and Libya.  

The response came Friday after Western nations made the accusations, which Mali’s military government dismissed with a demand that they provide independent evidence.  

A day earlier, France and 15 other Western nations had condemned what they called the deployment of Wagner mercenaries to Mali.  

 

The joint statement said they deeply regret the transitional authorities’ choice to use already scarce public funds to pay foreign mercenaries instead of supporting its own armed forces and the Malian people.

The statement also called on the Russian government to behave more responsibly, accusing it of providing material support to the Wagner Group’s deployment, which Moscow denies.  

The Mali government acknowledged what it called “Russian trainers” were in the country.  It said they were present to help strengthen the operational capacities of their defense and security forces.  

Aly Tounkara is director of the Center for Security and Strategic Studies in the Sahel, a Bamako-based think tank.  

He says it’s hard to tell if the Russian security presence is military or mercenary but, regardless, would likely be supporting rather than front-line fighting.    

This could allow the Malian army to have victories over the enemy that will be attributed to them, says Tounkara, which was not the case with the French forces.  He says the second advantage is that victories over extremists could allow Mali’s military to legitimize itself.  We must remember, says Tounkara, that one of the reasons for the forced departure of President Keita, was that the security situation was so bad.

Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita was overthrown in an August 2020 coup led by Colonel Assimi Goita after months of anti-government protests, much of it over worsening security.  

Goita launched a second coup in May that removed the interim government leaders, but has promised to hold elections in 2022.  

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has been pushing Mali’s military government to hold elections.  

ECOWAS in November expressed concern over a potential Wagner Group deployment to Mali after unconfirmed reports that the military government was in talks with the mercenary group.

Popular protests in Bamako have called for French forces to leave Mali and last year some protesters were seen calling for Russian ones to intervene.

Since French forces first arrived in Mali in 2013, public opinion on their presence has shifted from favorable to widely negative.  

 

The French military has been gradually drawing down its anti-insurgent Operation Barkhane forces from the Sahel region.

French forces this year withdrew from all but one military base in northern Mali, saying the Malian armed forces were ready to take the lead on their own security.

But analysts say one consequence of the French leaving is that the Malian army is seeking other partners. 

Boubacar Salif Traore is director of Afriglob Conseil, a Bamako-based development and security consulting firm. 

“Official Russian cooperation would be very advantageous for the Malian army in terms of supplying equipment,” he says. “Mali, and many African countries, notably the Central African Republic, have concluded that France does not play fair in terms of delivering arms.  Every time these states ask for weapons, either there’s an embargo or there is a problem in procuring these weapons. Russia can provide these weapons without constraints and it’s precisely that which interests Mali.” 

In September, Mali received four military helicopters and other weapons bought from Russia.  

The Malian transitional government’s statement Friday did not elaborate on what the Russian trainers would be doing in Mali. 

When asked to comment, a government spokesman would not elaborate and referred questions to the ministry of foreign affairs, which does not list any contact numbers on its website. 
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As Europe rang in the New Year 20 years ago, 12 of its nations said goodbye to their deutschmarks, French francs, liras and pesetas as they welcomed the euro single currency. 

On January 1, 2002, euro notes and coins became a reality for some 300 million people from Athens to Dublin, three years after the currency was formally launched in “virtual” form. 

Here is a recap of the event, drawn from AFP reporting at the time: 

In a far cry from the austere New Year’s celebrations imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic 20 years later, fireworks, music and lights blazed at midnight into the early morning of January 1, 2002, to mark the biggest monetary switch in history. 

AFP reported that many people passed on their traditional New Year’s Eve parties, choosing instead to queue up at cash dispensers in their enthusiasm to get hold of the first pristine euro notes. 

In Berlin, Germans said hello to the euro and goodbye to their beloved mark at a special ceremony at the Brandenburg Gate, as up to 1 million people thronged the streets for the traditional giant New Year’s Eve street party there. 

The euro cash was also a hit in the coffee shops and red-light district of Amsterdam. 

Irish revelers were, however, less in a hurry to welcome the euro, continuing to pay for Guinness, Ireland’s favorite tipple, in the national currency, leaving the headache of the changeover until the next day. 

As many feared, the euro switch provoked sporadic price hikes across Europe. 

From Spanish bus tickets, which jumped by 33%, to a Finnish bazaar, where “everything for 10 markka (1.68 euros)” was now “everything for two euros,” many price tags were a bit heftier since the single currency became legal tender. 

The European Central Bank president at the time, Wim Duisenberg, who warned merchants not to take advantage of the euro launch to increase prices, said he had not seen signs of widespread abuse. 

“When I bought a Big Mac and a strawberry milkshake this week it cost 4.45 euros, which is exactly the same amount as I paid for the same meal last week,” Duisenberg told reporters. 

Europe surprised itself with the almost glitch-free transition to the single currency, AFP reported. 

The Germans — reputedly skeptical about the single currency and nostalgic for their mark — turned out to be among the most enthusiastic. 

An editorial in the popular German tabloid Bild proclaimed: “Our new money is moving full speed ahead. No problems whatsoever in saying adieu to the mark, no tears to be shed.” 

Initial “europhoria” was, however, tempered as a few hiccups appeared, such as cash shortages and long lines in banks, post offices and at toll booths. 

France urged citizens to not rush all at once to the banks with their savings, often hoarded under mattresses and in jam jars, since they had until June 30 to get rid of their francs at commercial banks and until 2012 at the Bank of France. 

And the European Commission reported minor problems in getting small euro bills and coins distributed in most countries. 

Duisenberg said, however, he was sure that January 1, 2002, would be written into history books as the start of a new European era. 

 
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The announcement by Russia’s Defense Ministry Saturday that 10,000 troops deployed along the border with Ukraine are to return to their permanent bases isn’t easing the alarm of Western officials, who see the risks mounting of Russian military action.

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin last week indicated his country’s willingness to sit down for talks with the United States and NATO amid soaring tensions, prompted by the Kremlin deploying more than 100,000 troops near its borders with Ukraine. 

 

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a televised interview Monday that Moscow was still waiting for NATO’s response to various conditions for talks to take place over security guarantees being sought from the West. They include Russian defense officials and generals participating in the negotiations. “We have said the conversation will make sense only with the direct participation of the military,” Lavrov said. 

 

He said talks with U.S. officials would likely occur “right after the New Year’s Eve” but that Moscow is still waiting for an agreement over parameters for the negotiations with NATO. 

The security guarantees the Russian leader is demanding would preclude any further NATO expansion and would roll back any NATO military presence in the Baltic or central European states which joined the Western alliance in waves since 1999. The Kremlin is adamant that former Soviet republics of Ukraine or Georgia should not join the Atlantic alliance. 

 

While the United States and its NATO allies have said they’re willing to enter talks with Russia, Western diplomats have warned Russian security proposals are not acceptable in their current form. In a conference call last week with reporters, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Karen Donfried said talks would have better prospects if Russia de-escalates its military buildup along the border with Ukraine. 

“Any dialogue with Russia must address NATO’s and others concerns about Russia’s continued threatening behavior and be based on the core principles and foundational documents of European security. We will not compromise the key principles on which European security is built, including that all countries have the right to decide their own foreign and security policy course free from outside interference,” she added. 

 

U.S. and NATO officials have been adamant that it is unreasonable for Moscow to seek a veto over the foreign policy direction chosen by Kyiv or any other sovereign country.

 

Western officials say they remain fearful Moscow is still considering launching a full-scale invasion of its neighbor, unless NATO accedes to Kremlin demands that would upend the Western alliance as it has evolved since the end of the Cold War. U.S. and Western officials have expressed rising concerns that Russia is contemplating a repeat of 2014, when Moscow annexed Crimea and used armed proxies to seize a large part of the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. 

 

The troop withdrawal announced Saturday amounts to just 10% of the 122,000 Russian soldiers Western and Ukraine intelligence agencies calculate have been gathered along the border since October. Russian military officials said they are withdrawing about 10,000 troops from near Ukraine because they have completed their mission in snap drills, simulating a response to a “massive airstrike” on Russia. 

 

Western defense analysts say the troops are being pulled back from the less militarily important south, while there are no signs of troops and equipment being withdrawn from Ukraine’s northern and northeastern borders, across which Russia would most likely strike. 

 

Back and forth troop movements and increasingly direct rhetoric from Kremlin officials and President Vladimir Putin himself have been keeping Western powers in a state of nervous tension as they try to gauge the intentions of the Russian leader and maintain unity as they mull to what degree they should spurn or engage with the Kremlin. 

Midweek, President Putin said Russia would take “appropriate retaliatory” military steps in response to what he called the West’s “aggressive stance,” although on Thursday Putin appeared to lower the rhetorical volume by praising the United States for its “positive” reaction to Russia’s security proposals and said talks would take place in January. 

 

But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov Sunday maintained the drumbeat of stern Russian warnings, saying Putin will ponder a slew of retaliatory options if the West fails to meet his demands for security guarantees. 

 

NATO’s expansion to Ukraine or other ex-Soviet nations is “a matter of life or death for us,” Peskov said in an interview on Russian television. He added that a test firing Friday of Russia’s new Zircon hypersonic missiles was meant to make Russia’s security demands “more convincing.” 

 

Friday’s test firings marked the first time Zircon missiles have been launched in a salvo. 

 

Peskov said the Kremlin would set no artificial deadline for the talks, but meetings likely to go ahead in January would be enough to see if the U.S. is ready to accept Russian terms or would try to drag out the negotiation indefinitely, which he said would be unacceptable. His remarks about there being no artificial deadline contrasted with comments by Putin last week who said in a press conference that he wanted his security demands met “immediately. Right now.” 

 

“Not sure this indicates much hope for talks to succeed,” tweeted Russian political analyst Vladimir Frolov. 

 

Andrew Marshall of the Atlantic Council, a U.S.-based research group, says the geopolitical stakes are rising rapidly. “The outcome of this dispute could decisively rewrite the terms of security on the European continent for an entire generation — just as the decisions of the 1990s did after the end of the Cold War,” he said in an Atlantic Council commentary. 

 

He added, “It could also produce one of two sharply contrasting narratives for the United States in Europe and globally: Negotiating successfully could underline the power of the United States working with its friends and be a model for confronting authoritarianism at gunpoint; but failure will be seen as another marker of American weakness and the unraveling of the transatlantic partnership.” 

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, has been lobbying for Ukrainian officials to be able to participate in any security talks among the U.S., NATO and Russia. “We support the idea of the U.S., the EU, NATO talking to Russia as long as the primary topic is ending the international armed conflict, Russia’s war on Ukraine,” he wrote on Twitter Friday. “Decisions on Ukraine’s security can only be made with Ukraine at the table, and with the EU at the table on matters of wider European security,” he said. 
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