Memorial International Association

Memorial will keep researching, documenting and analyzing all manifestations of political violence, past and present, in the former USSR and other countries affected by the crimes of Soviet and post-Soviet regimes.

Memorial will at the same time fight for human rights, promote building and maintaining civil societies, and democracy-driven, law-bound governments.

 

From the declaration of the International Memorial Association

On May 16, 2023, fifteen organizations of the Memorial network established the International Memorial Association, which is registered in Geneva. The Association unites Memorials from different cities and countries and continues the work and best projects of International Memorial, which was banned by the Russian regime just before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Memorial emerged as a civic movement in many cities and republics across what was then the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, when society’s demand for truth increased dramatically. The first chairperson of Memorial was human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov.

Current board members: Anna Gavina, Giulia De Florio, Sergey Krivenko, Štěpán Černoušek, Irina Scherbakova and Nicolas Werth (chair).

Before 2022

The purpose of the work done by Memorial is pursuing the truth, investigating and documenting crimes committed by the Soviet government against the citizens and peoples of the USSR and international crimes. Soon after Memorial was created, another mission naturally emerged: advocating human rights and documenting state crimes committed in the former USSR.

This work of never-ending exploration and reflection can never truly be completed. But it must be done, and only then can Russia become a peaceful neighbor for other countries and a place where the rights of all people and groups are equally respected.

Now

2022 and the years that have followed have made us see new connections and features of similarity between the crimes of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. What are the historical roots of Russia's war against Ukraine? What are the consequences, still relevant even if invisible, of the Soviet regime’s crimes: its oppression of peoples, deportations, discrimination of women, LGBTQ+, political dissenters, religious and language groups, and many other forms of unfreedom?

What are the traditions of resistance to unfreedom that today's civil activists can draw on to fight Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, to fight for civil liberties and for a fair trial for all state criminals?

In 2022, Memorial was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with the Belarusian human rights activist Ales Bialiatski and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties. We take this prize as an admonition that Russian civil society is expected to act up.