The shuttering of Memorial

The end of the peace and the burden of inheritance

Today at the Cosmopolitan Globalist, Joshua Treviño writes about the liquidation of Memorial in a gloomy essay about unfinished business and the inheritance of our generation. We weren’t going to trouble you with gloomy thoughts at this time of the year, but we can’t control Putin’s schedule; besides, his essay is very good.

Founded by Andrei Sakharov in the twilight of the Soviet Union, Memorial had a dual mission: to support human rights in contemporary Russia and to preserve the memory of the USSR’s crimes. There were many crimes to remember. Memorial documented millions of innocent lives snuffed out, executed, imprisoned, shot, starved, terrorized, persecuted. They built a database of more than 2.6 million victims of Soviet repression, identifying the perpetrators of these crimes. They also defended present-day victims of human rights abuses and political repression.

This proved too much for Putin. The Russian government designated Memorial a foreign agent, a label Monique Camarra has explained here. Memorial was required to preface its every public statement with the declaration that it was a foreign agent—a recycling of the Soviet smear, “Enemy of the People.” It was smeared, fined, raided by police, and now, at last, it has been shuttered.

When I read what Joshua wrote, I thought immediately of Vladimir Bukovsky, who told me more than once that the West’s failure to hold a Nuremberg-style trial, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to expose the evils of communism would forever haunt Russia and the West. He was absolutely right.

Joshua, by the way, has begun writing on Substack. No one writes more evocatively about Texas (or Mexico, or China) than he does; it would be well worth your while to subscribe.

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