A2 · Elementary
12 min
politicshistoryhuman rights
El País que Olvida: Rusia y la Memoria Prohibida
The Country That Forgets: Russia and Forbidden Memory
Fletcher breaks down this story in English. Octavio reacts and expands in Spanish. Follow along with the live transcript, tap any word for its translation. Elementary level — perfect for beginners building confidence.
So something happened in Russia this week that I think deserves a lot more attention than it's getting.
Russia's Supreme Court, responding to a petition from the Ministry of Justice, has designated Memorial an extremist organization and banned its activities entirely.
Bueno, Memorial es muy importante.
Well, Memorial is very important.
Es un grupo de derechos humanos.
It's a human rights group.
Trabaja desde 1989.
It has been working since 1989.
Right.
And I want to be clear about what 'extremist' means in the Russian legal context, because it's not just a label.
Once you're designated extremist, anyone who participates in your activities, donates money, or even publicly supports you can face criminal prosecution.
This is serious.
Mira, el gobierno ya cierra Memorial en 2021.
Look, the government already shut down Memorial in 2021.
Ahora es peor.
Now it's worse.
Ahora es un crimen.
Now it's a crime.
Exactly.
There are two separate moves here, and they matter in sequence.
The 2021 dissolution was basically saying, 'you can't operate.' The 2026 extremist designation is saying, 'if you try to operate anyway, you go to prison.' It's a ratchet being turned.
Es que el gobierno tiene miedo de la historia.
The thing is, the government is afraid of history.
Memorial habla del pasado.
Memorial talks about the past.
Eso es peligroso.
That is dangerous.
Let's back up for listeners who may not know what Memorial actually is.
Because I think once you understand what this organization did, the government's fear of it starts to make a very specific kind of sense.
Bueno, Memorial documenta el Gulag.
Well, Memorial documents the Gulag.
El Gulag es el sistema de prisiones soviéticas.
The Gulag is the Soviet prison system.
Muchas personas mueren allí.
Many people died there.
The Gulag.
For people who need that word unpacked: it's the Soviet forced labor camp system.
Millions of people, political prisoners mostly, were sent to these camps from the 1920s through the 1950s.
A huge number of them died.
Memorial's entire mission was to make sure that was never forgotten.
Mira, Andréi Sájarov funda Memorial.
Look, Andrei Sakharov founded Memorial.
Sájarov es un científico y activista muy famoso.
Sakharov is a very famous scientist and activist.
Es un héroe para muchos rusos.
He is a hero for many Russians.
Sakharov.
The man who helped build the Soviet hydrogen bomb and then spent the rest of his life fighting the Soviet state.
He's arguably the most morally serious figure Russian public life produced in the twentieth century.
And Memorial was, in a real sense, his last project before he died in 1989.
A ver, Memorial hace dos cosas.
Let's see, Memorial does two things.
Primero, guarda los nombres de las víctimas.
First, it keeps the names of the victims.
Segundo, ayuda a las familias hoy.
Second, it helps families today.
That's the thing that gets me.
It wasn't just an archive.
Memorial was also doing active human rights work in the present, documenting abuses in Chechnya, in Ukraine, tracking political prisoners in modern Russia.
It was a living organization, not just a museum.
La verdad es que el gobierno no quiere esa información.
The truth is the government doesn't want that information.
Es muy incómodo para Putin.
It is very uncomfortable for Putin.
Here's what gets me about the Gulag specifically.
Putin has built a version of Russian national identity that is rooted almost entirely in victory, on Soviet greatness, on the Second World War, on the idea of Russia as a mighty civilization.
The Gulag complicates that narrative catastrophically.
Bueno, muchos rusos saben la historia.
Well, many Russians know the history.
Pero el Estado dice: eso no es importante ahora.
But the State says: that is not important now.
Right.
And this is not a new problem in Russia.
After Stalin died in 1953, Khrushchev gave his famous 'Secret Speech' denouncing Stalin's crimes.
There was a brief thaw.
Then it stopped.
The Soviet Union never fully reckoned with the Gulag the way, say, Germany reckoned with the Holocaust.
Mira, en Alemania hay museos.
Look, in Germany there are museums.
Hay educación.
There is education.
Hay memoria oficial.
There is official memory.
En Rusia no es igual.
In Russia it is not the same.
The comparison to Germany is actually striking.
After 1945, West Germany made a deliberate, painful, institutionalized choice to confront what had happened.
Russia never made that choice in any sustained way.
And Memorial was, for decades, the main institution trying to force that reckoning from below, from civil society, without state support.
Es que Memorial tiene millones de nombres.
The thing is, Memorial has millions of names.
Nombres de personas del Gulag.
Names of people from the Gulag.
Eso es muy poderoso.
That is very powerful.
Millions of names.
Think about what that means.
Not a statistic.
Not 'approximately seven million people died.' Actual names, actual villages, actual families.
That's the difference between history as abstraction and history as accountability.
I can see exactly why that frightens a government.
A ver, el gobierno dice que Memorial es un agente extranjero.
Let's see, the government says that Memorial is a foreign agent.
Recibe dinero de otros países.
It receives money from other countries.
The foreign agent accusation.
This is the legal mechanism Russia has used against almost every independent civil society organization since about 2012.
The law was modeled, deliberately, on the American Foreign Agents Registration Act from the 1930s.
Putin actually said that publicly.
The difference is the American law is rarely invoked.
The Russian version is a weapon.
Bueno, la ley de agentes extranjeros llega en 2012.
Well, the foreign agents law arrives in 2012.
Desde entonces, muchos grupos tienen problemas.
Since then, many groups have problems.
Look, I covered Russia on and off for years.
What happened after 2012 was a systematic demolition.
Independent newspapers, radio stations, NGOs, one by one.
Novaya Gazeta, Echo of Moscow, Levada Center forced to register as foreign agent.
Memorial was always near the top of the list because of what it represented.
La verdad es que la guerra en Ucrania hace todo peor.
The truth is that the war in Ukraine makes everything worse.
El Estado necesita más control ahora.
The State needs more control now.
There's a direct line there that I think is worth tracing.
The war in Ukraine requires a particular story about Russia, about its history, about what it is and what it's fighting for.
An organization that documents state terror and keeps the names of its victims is, in wartime, almost existentially threatening to that story.
Mira, los voluntarios de Memorial trabajan en muchos países ahora.
Look, Memorial's volunteers work in many countries now.
Continúan el trabajo desde fuera.
They continue the work from outside.
This is the part that actually gives me some hope, and I say that carefully.
When Russia dissolved Memorial in 2021, a lot of the staff and volunteers simply moved.
Berlin, Prague, Riga.
And they kept working.
The extremist designation will make that harder, because it puts their families inside Russia at risk.
Es que 'extremista' es una palabra muy grave.
The thing is, 'extremist' is a very serious word.
Es la misma palabra que el Estado usa para ISIS.
It is the same word the State uses for ISIS.
Exactly right.
And that's not an accident.
When you put a human rights archive in the same legal category as a terrorist organization, you're not making a legal argument.
You're making a political statement.
You're telling Russian society what kind of thinking the state considers dangerous.
Bueno, hay una tradición rusa de escritores y artistas que guardan la memoria.
Well, there is a Russian tradition of writers and artists who keep the memory alive.
Solzhenitsyn, por ejemplo.
Solzhenitsyn, for example.
Solzhenitsyn.
'The Gulag Archipelago.' One of the most important books of the twentieth century, written in secret, smuggled out of the Soviet Union, published in Paris in 1973.
The Soviet state did everything it could to suppress it.
They exiled Solzhenitsyn.
The book survived.
Memory is very hard to kill.
A ver, Memorial también documenta Chechenia.
Let's see, Memorial also documents Chechnya.
Eso es muy importante.
That is very important.
Y muy peligroso.
And very dangerous.
Chechnya is the other chapter that makes this whole story darker.
Memorial documented both Chechen wars, the atrocities committed by Russian forces, the disappearances, the filtration camps.
Several of their workers were killed for that reporting.
Natalya Estemirova was murdered in 2009.
She was a Memorial researcher.
The case was never seriously investigated.
Mira, en España también hay una ley de memoria histórica.
Look, in Spain there is also a historical memory law.
Es diferente.
It is different.
El Estado ayuda a recordar.
The State helps people to remember.
I want to sit with that contrast for a second.
In Spain, after Franco, the question of how to deal with the past was contested and painful.
It took decades.
There have been law changes, exhumations, arguments.
But the direction of travel was toward more memory, not less.
Russia is moving in the opposite direction.
La verdad es que en España hay muchas tumbas sin nombre todavía.
The truth is that in Spain there are still many unnamed graves.
Es un problema difícil.
It is a difficult problem.
No, you're absolutely right about that.
Spain has its own unfinished reckoning.
But here's the difference: civil society organizations in Spain that work to identify those graves are not being designated as extremist terrorist threats by the Supreme Court.
The direction of the state matters.
Bueno, ¿qué pasa con los jóvenes rusos?
Well, what happens with young Russians?
¿Ellos saben la historia del Gulag?
Do they know the history of the Gulag?
That's the central question, isn't it.
Memorial ran a program called 'Return of the Names,' where people gathered in public squares and read the names of Gulag victims aloud, for hours.
Thousands of people participated.
Young people participated.
That program, by the way, is now illegal under the extremist designation.
Es que leer un nombre ahora es un acto peligroso.
The thing is, reading a name is now a dangerous act.
Eso es increíble.
That is incredible.
The extraordinary thing is that we've reached a point in Russia where reading a name out loud in a public square can, technically, now constitute participation in extremist activity.
That's not hyperbole.
That's the legal reality the Supreme Court just created this week.
Mira, el mundo observa.
Look, the world watches.
Pero el mundo tiene muchos problemas ahora.
But the world has many problems now.
Nadie habla mucho de esto.
Nobody talks much about this.
And that's the tragedy of the timing, isn't it.
There's a war in the Middle East, a ceasefire that may or may not hold, drones over Kuwait.
Memorial gets a paragraph.
But I'd argue that what a state does to its own memory, to the people trying to preserve its darkest truths, tells you everything about where that state is going.
A ver, los documentos de Memorial existen todavía.
Let's see, Memorial's documents still exist.
Están en servidores en Europa.
They are on servers in Europe.
El trabajo continúa.
The work continues.
Right.
And this matters more than it might seem.
The Soviet Union tried to destroy documents too, and it failed.
The Stasi in East Germany tried to shred everything, and German citizens physically stopped the shredding machines with their hands.
History has a way of surviving the people who want to erase it.
But the people trying to preserve it pay a price.
Bueno, la memoria no es solo el pasado.
Well, memory is not only the past.
La memoria habla del presente también.
Memory speaks about the present too.
That's the thing.
I spent years in places where governments tried to erase what they'd done.
In Argentina after the dictatorship, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo stood in a public square every Thursday holding photographs of the disappeared.
Governments fell.
The mothers kept standing.
Memorial was Russia's version of that.
And now they've been called extremists for it.
La verdad es que esto es muy triste.
The truth is that this is very sad.
Pero Memorial no desaparece.
But Memorial does not disappear.
Las personas continúan.
The people continue.
I'll end on that.
Because I think that's the most important thing to hold onto.
Institutions can be banned.
Buildings can be closed.
But the people who built Memorial, who collected those names, who sat with survivors and wrote down what happened to them, those people are still alive.
The names are still there.
The work goes on.