The Real Russia. Today.

The history of Memorial

Wednesday, December 1, 2021

* International: Blinken and Lavrov will sit down on Thursday, Jens Stoltenberg says Russia has no say, OSINT researchers lose railcar tracking access, and Matviyenko jokes about war

* Law and order: The history of Memorial, how Beria’s ‘girlfriend’ followed in his footsteps, beating the police in court, Varlamov pays for his barb, and Bastrykin launches a federal investigation into Eva Voronkova’s death

* Public policy: Putin’s annual press conference will be on December 23, and the Russian military says no to QR-code vaccine passports

International

🕊️ Blinken will meet Lavrov in Stockholm on Thursday (The U.S. secretary of state and Russian foreign minister will sit down on the sidelines of the OSCE summit. Blinken will have a separate meeting with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.)

🛡️ ‘Russia has no veto’ on Ukrainian NATO membership, says NATO Secretary-General (“Russia has no say. And Russia has no right to establish a sphere of influence, trying to control their neighbors,” Jens Stoltenberg told reporters at his own post-ministerial news conference)

🚆 OSINT researchers say Russian railcar tracking system has disabled their accounts (According to the Conflict Intelligence Team, multiple military researchers have suddenly encountered restricted access to GdeVagon. They have been tracking Russian military units’ westward movements toward the border with Ukraine.)

😂 Federation Council chairwoman jokes that Russians enlist in the military before emigrating as refugees (Commenting on recent events at the Belarusian-Polish border, and perhaps on tensions at Russia’s border with Ukraine, Valentina Matviyenko said, “Why, unlike other countries, does Russia have no refugees? Because Russians immediately run to military recruiters when the times get tough. Let our so-called partners understand that.”)

Law and order

🕯️ The history of Memorial: ‘Something needed to be done’ (11-min read)

Many people associate Memorial with the study of Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror. But for more than 30 years, this organization has also carried out crucial human rights work, on top of preserving the memory of victims of Soviet-era political repressions. Memorial’s staff have played a key role in everything from hostage negotiations to helping refugees and political prisoners. Nevertheless, in November of this year, the Russian Attorney General’s Office moved to liquidate the group’s parent organization, Memorial International, for allegedly violating the country’s legislation on “foreign agents” by failing to include mandatory disclaimers on its public materials. In this brief history, Meduza looks back on the life and work of Russia’s oldest and most prominent human rights organization.

⚖️ Holod Media retells the sad and ironic life story of Lavrentiy Beria’s ‘girlfriend’

Relying on archival resources collected by the Memorial group, journalists at Holod Media pieced together the life of Nina Gnevkovskaya, a woman who survived the unwanted affections of secret police czar Lavrentiy Beria and four years in the Gulag only to emerge as a Moscow prosecutor who helped perpetuate Soviet political repressions.

Beria’s head of security personally lured Gnevkovskaya to Beria’s summer home, beginning years of police surveillance and unwanted sexual advances from Beria. As she resisted his overtures, the authorities started arresting and imprisoning her friends. In early 1950, as Beria competed against Viktor Abukumov for control over the secret police apparatus, officers arrested Gnevkovskaya for possession of anti-Soviet literature. Citing testimony extracted through torture from some of her imprisoned friends, a judge later sentenced her to seven years in the labor camps for allegedly defaming the Soviet authorities. Gnevkovskaya spent almost four years at a camp in the Kirov region. The labor was so brutal that she suffered permanent damage to her health, becoming partly disabled.

Then the political winds changed again, this time in her favor: In October 1953, a few months after Beria was arrested for treason, Gnevkovskaya was returned to Moscow to testify about how she met Beria. Within a month of Beria’s execution, Gnevkovskaya was exonerated and released from prison.

Holod Media was unable to determine how she managed it, but Gnevkovskaya resurfaces in archival documents in January 1967 as a Moscow prosecutor. Throughout the decade, she worked several high-profile cases against dissidents, including charges against the seven Soviet citizens who dared to demonstrate in Red Square in August 1968 in favor of the Prague Spring. Having reinvented herself as an accomplice to political persecution, Gnevkovskaya also helped put dissidents in forced psychiatric care. She disappears from the archives in the 1970s but resurfaces a decade later, raiding the home of another dissident. In 2001, at the age of 75, Nina Gnevkovskaya granted a television interview where she defended the crackdown on Moscow’s Prague Spring demonstrators, arguing that they were freeloaders and foreign agents.

More law-and-order news

⚖️ St. Petersburg man wins lawsuit against police for mistreatment after arrest (Supposedly to prevent a suicide risk, officers removed Nikita Karmanov’s pants because of a drawstring, but they left him his shoelaces. He was forced to sit undressed in a public space for several hours. A judge awarded him roughly $540 for the humiliation.)

⚖️ In first-ever loss over published content, blogger Ilya Varlamov is ordered to delete offensive post and pay small fine (in defense of beautification efforts, he referred to a homeowners’ association in Petrozavodsk as “shit-guardians” for opposing new regulations limiting the number of signs and advertisements that can be displayed outside buildings)

🕵️ Federal investigators open felony negligence case after 10-year-old cystic fibrosis patient dies without medicine (Director Alexander Bastrykin ordered the investigation after public outrage. Local journalists say Eva Voronkova died because “bureaucratic complexities” prevented her from receiving court-ordered Trikafta.)

Public policy

📅 Putin’s annual presser is set for December 23 with 500 hand-picked journalists (No open accreditation for reporters, this year. The Kremlin says the pandemic necessitates the new restrictions, including three negative PCR COVID-19 test results for all participants.)

🛂 Russian Defense Ministry wants soldiers exempted from QR-code vaccine requirements to guard their (classified) personal data (The military wants to use ordinary certificates, arguing that soldiers stationed in some areas are prohibited from using mobile phones. Defense Minister Shoigu said in June that 93 percent of soldiers and their families had been vaccinated against COVID-19.)

🕊️ Tomorrow in history: 104 years ago, tomorrow on December 2, 1917, Russia and the Central Powers signed an armistice at Brest-Litovsk, and peace talks leading to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk began.

Yours, Meduza