By awarding the prize to those who defend human rights at home, the Norwegian committee has highlighted the connection between international security and civic freedoms
. Its initial goal was historical, to document the crimes committed under Stalin. Every year Memorial staged a mass recitation of the names of some of his millions of victims, read out by thousands of participants.
As post-Soviet Russia began to abuse its citizens, first in Chechnya and then throughout the country, Memorial became the country’s best human-rights organisation. Its existence had in itself marked a distinction between the new state and the old terror-wielding one. But Russia’s failure to come to terms with the legacy of Stalinism allowed Mr Putin to shatter that line. By banning the group last year, he made it easier to whitewash the crimes of the past and to commit new ones.
“Memorial creates a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state…Why should we, the descendants of the victors, watch attempts to rehabilitate traitors to the motherland…?” a state prosecutor said, chillingly, at the time. “It makes us repent of the Soviet past, instead of remembering its glorious history.” Two months later, Mr Putin had started his war against Ukraine, using Belarus as a bridgehead for his attack on Kyiv.
Ales Bialiatski, a Belarusian dissident who helped to set up Viasna in 1996 to defend political prisoners, was awarded his prize while in jail in Belarus. Having already spent nearly five years locked up in the early 2010s, he chose to return to Belarus in 2020 to take part in mass protests against Mr Lukashenko, who stole the presidential election that year, but managed to remain in power thanks to extreme brutality and the backing of Mr Putin.
At the time of the announcement of the award on October 7th, some of the Memorial team were in a Moscow court fighting the government’s decision to seize its building, which contains a unique archive of documents for more than 3m victims of Stalin’s great terror. Memories and evidence of state crimes are things that both Mr Putin and Mr Lukashenko seek to erase. People who gather evidence and keep memories alive do important work, as the Nobel committee has recognised.
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