Investigative Committee opens a criminal case about “rehabilitation of Nazism” against employees of human rights group Memorial

Russia’s Investigative Committee is investigating employees of Memorial, a group founded to study human rights violations committed under Stalin, for “rehabilitation of Nazism,” a source in law enforcement told Russian news agency TASS.

The source says authorities suspect that Memorial included individuals who collaborated with fascists during World War II on a list of repressed people. The criminal case reportedly involves “unidentified employees” of the human rights organization.

An anonymously run Telegram channel, which is associated with law enforcement agencies, reported earlier that Memorial’s employees “deliberately disseminated false information about the activities of the USSR in the years of the Second World War.”

Memorial was founded in 1987 to study political repression in the USSR and to rehabilitate its victims. A Russian court liquidated the international Memorial organization in 2021, and the Russian authorities confiscated Memorial’s Moscow office space in 2022.