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In November, shortly before the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian authorities took steps to shut down Memorial, one of the country’s oldest and most influential NGOs dedicated to preserving the memory of the Stalin-era repressions. . Despite everything, the group’s historians are determined to continue the fight to open the archives of the Soviet secret services. Report by Elena Volochine from France 24, with illustrations by Sofiya Voznaya.
Thirty years ago, on December 25, 1991, the president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) Mikhail Gorbachev resigned. It was the end of the Soviet empire that had lasted almost 70 years and he was the last of the leaders to serve under the red flag of the hammer and sickle.
From 1929 until his death in 1953, that position was held by Joseph Stalin, responsible for the extermination of between 3 and 20 million of his fellow citizens, according to different estimates.
Some 750,000 people are believed to have been shot and killed during the two years of the ‘Great Terror’ alone, 1937 and 1938, the years of the extrajudicial courts of the ‘Troika’. Meanwhile, it is estimated that more than 18 million people were sent to the Gulag concentration camps, where many of them would die of hunger, cold, disease and exhaustion from forced labor.
Gulag is short for Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerei, the central body that administered the Soviet Union’s sprawling concentration camp apparatus. The Gulag has become the symbol of a whole system, described by the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his masterpiece ‘The Gulag Archipelago’.
When the USSR fell in 1991, the archives of the NKVD, the Soviet secret services, ancestors of the KGB and the current Russian FSB, were partially opened. The move gave historians hope that it would finally be possible to shed light on the darkest hours of the past.
But in 2015, an FSB decree declared the identities of NKVD officers who signed deportation and execution orders state secrets. On December 8, 2021, Sergey Prudovsky, a researcher at the NGO Memorial, failed to get the Supreme Court of Russia to lift this secret. The Memorial itself was declared a “foreign agent” in 2014 by the Russian State and is now the subject of a liquidation process.
As pressure mounts on those fighting to reveal the details of Stalinism’s crimes, and in particular the names of the perpetrators and victims, Russian civil society groups say the Kremlin is reverting to the methods of the era. Soviet, with all-powerful secret services, a state interest that prevails over individual rights and freedoms, as well as reports of systematic torture within the Russian prison system, inherited from the Gulag.
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