Russia, Memorial Italia included in the list of extremist organizations

The Memorial Italia association – founded in 2004, part of the Memorial network, an NGO created in Moscow at the end of the 1980s and today partially dissolved through judicial proceedings by the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation – is made up of Eastern European historians, Slavic scholars, translators and enthusiasts of Russian, Ukrainian, Central Asian and Caucasian history and culture, interested in the issues of the preservation of historical memory and human rights. Recently the organization has promoted campaigns against Moscow’s operations in Italy, such as the concert that the Russian conductor, loyal to Putin and supporter of the war in Ukraine, Valery Gergiev, was supposed to hold at the Royal Palace of Caserta last July, an event later canceled following the protests. Coinciding with the inauguration of the Art Biennale last May, Memorial Italia promoted the action “From the margins of the empire to the open lagoon. Names. Faces. Voices”, with the aim of “making artists of the indigenous and colonized peoples of the Russian Federation visible, in a space open to the public” and denouncing the long history of internal repression carried out by Moscow.

“Art is never apolitical in times of war. Cultural spaces are not neutral zones. Hosting Gergiev while war crimes continue, while Ukrainian cities are bombed and civilians killed and deported – transforms theaters into a platform for brutal whitewashing. We tend to forget that Gergiev is not simply an artist. Instead and above all he is a man of power within artistic institutions in which those who express differing opinions on Putin’s imperialist adventures risk their jobs and personal freedom”, had denounced Memorial Italia last year, to request the cancellation of the concert.

To be declared an extremist in Russia – with all that this entails for the employees of the organizations, but also for those who participate in the activities of the group in question, even just with donations, or favorable comments on social media, criminal offenses punishable by imprisonment of up to ten years in prison – a court ruling is necessary. There are no traces of a step of this kind towards Memorial Italia or OVD-Info.

But last April, the international Memorial movement – an organization that does not exist under this name, just as there is no international LGBTQ movement, another name on the list from 2023 – and its “structural divisions” were declared extremist at the end of a brief closed-door hearing and on the basis of a file classified as “top secret” by the Ministry of Justice.

The Supreme Court’s ruling did not specify what this term meant and, above all, which entities it included. It therefore seems that Memorial Italia, and also OVD-Info, but the list also includes Memorial France, Memorial Germany and organizations that have been dissolved for years, have been considered as structural divisions of Memorial.

OVD-Info, a group born in December 2011, on the initiative of two activists close to Memorial, Daniil Beilinson and Grigory Okhotin, who in that period of massive demonstrations against fraud in the legislative elections and the exchange of seats between Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev in view of the presidential elections of March 2012, had begun to go around the police stations to collect data on the arrested activists.

Little by little, over the years the organization had grown, as had the number of volunteers who collected information and lawyers who provided assistance. Memorial Human Rights Center partnered with OVD-Info in 2013, but only to provide the smaller group with its more structured platform for collecting donations.

Among OVD-Info’s various forms of assistance to political prisoners, there is the one called Vestochka (little message), which has led thousands of people to write letters to prisoners, even anonymously, lifeblood for cases that do not have media coverage. The “Dyatel” (Woodpecker) platform takes into account violations of the rights of political prisoners and submits group appeals to the Investigative Committee, the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Federal Prison Service and other agencies, a step that unblocked the authorization of surgery for the prisoner Igor Baryshnikov. OVD-Info collects and analyzes data on judicial cases against political prisoners, analyzing the evolution of the repressive system.