How Russia is trying to control history in bid for geo-political strength

Amna Nawaz:

As we reported, today, Russia's highest court ordered the country's most prominent human rights organization closed.

The umbrella group Memorial documents today's Russian political prisoners, but also decades of Soviet human rights atrocities.

As Nick Schifrin reports, the ruling comes almost exactly 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union and as part of the Kremlin's battle over history.

Nick Schifrin:

Inside Russia's Supreme Court, the verdict was swift. A Russian judge ordered three decades of historical and human rights work — quote — "liquidated."

Outside, supporters of Memorial yelled: "There is no law."

Police showed whose law runs today's Russia. Memorial came together as the Soviet Union was falling apart. It was the late '80s, and Nobel Peace Prize winner and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, who had been exiled by previous Soviet leaders and celebrated by American officials, teamed up with then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the goal, document the truth about Soviet repression and collect the memories of millions of people who were marched to their death and forced to work in Soviet gulags, a history that Memorial says today's Russia is trying to erase.

Anna Dobrovolskaya, Executive Director, Memorial Human Rights Center:

All the branches of Memorial were very active opposing the attempts of authorities to forget about the repressions of Soviet times.

Nick Schifrin:

Anna Dobrovolskaya directs the sister organization Memorial Human Rights. It documents today's political prisoners, including main opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has been labeled the equivalent of al-Qaida.

Anna Dobrovolskaya:

Russia is not very safe place now. We have seen the list of people like former governors or former political leaders who are being recently arrested, and these numbers are growing.

Nick Schifrin:

Memorial Human Rights tracks the unprecedented crackdown on Russian civil society and media, and itself expects to be shut down by the same court tomorrow.

Anna Dobrovolskaya:

It sends a very clear signal to the other human rights organizations that they should be somehow more careful with what they say or what kind of campaigns they are one running.

And, of course, yes, a lot of people interpret it in a way that the memory about repressions has been targeted.

Nick Schifrin:

Gorbachev was willing to acknowledge the memory of those Soviet repressions. It fit his policies of glasnost and perestroika, openness and restructuring, as he tried to reform the Soviet Union.

His effort failed 30 years ago this past weekend, when, on Christmas Day, 1991, he ended his presidency and with it the Soviet Union itself.

There had been years of pressure, pro-democracy protests across Eastern Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall, calls for economic reform in part driven by minors all over the Soviet Union, and calls for democracy within against the Communist Party.

In 1991, Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin confronted Gorbachev. And, in December, Yeltsin and the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine created the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin calls the Soviet Union's demise the century's greatest geopolitical catastrophe, and he blames the West, especially NATO, for rubbing salt in the wound.

Vladimir Putin, Russian President (through translator):

Not one inch to the east is what we were told in the 1990s. And what happened? We were duped. We didn't come to the borders of the U.S. or the U.K. You came to us. Now you're telling us that Ukraine will also be in NATO.

Nick Schifrin:

Putin frames today's crisis on the borders of Ukraine, where the U.S. says as 100,000 Russian troops are ready to invade, as a product of historic Western wrongs. He demands NATO reverse its own historical promises and reject Ukrainian membership.

But, in Kiev, President Volodymyr Zelensky is trying to write a new future with the West.

Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukrainian President (through translator):

Ukraine's membership in NATO was a matter between Ukraine and the alliance, and definitely not the choice of any other country anywhere in the world.

Nick Schifrin:

And joining me now from Moscow is Vladislav Zubok, professor of international history at the London School of Economics and author most recently of "Collapse: The fall of the Soviet Union."

Welcome to the "NewsHour."

Let's start with today's news. Why do you think Memorial International and presumably tomorrow Memorial Human Rights are being targeted?

Vladislav Zubok, London School of Economics: Memorial stands for the clear language of denunciation of Stalinist past and terrorist past of the Soviet state.

President Vladimir Putin got interested in history himself, but he got interested in history in a very specific, very instrumental way. He was particularly passionate about the story of the outbreak of the Second World War and the responsibility of the Soviet Union for that outbreak.

If you read the documents that Memorial collected, you built a sort of a line that links the terror and the rise of Stalinism to the rise of totalitarianism in Europe and the outbreak of the war. And this is the story that the authorities don't like and Putin does not agree with.

Nick Schifrin:

Vladimir Putin talks about the war often, and the war is used across segments of society.

Why is that competition for the narrative over World War II so important?

Vladislav Zubok:

Putin, when he became the president, he gradually, but very purposefully began to resurrect the symbols of heroic past, particularly zeroing on the victory in the Second World War, which he always calls the great patriotic war, somewhat omitting that unpleasant episode from 1939 to 1941, when the Soviet Union was an ally of Nazi Germany.

And many millions of Russians somehow are ambivalent between realization, thanks to Memorial, that it was a very costly war and the regime was enormously repressive and millions lost their relatives, and the fact that, somehow, it was instrumentalized and justified by the complete victory of 1945.

And I think they know the leadership realizes this is sort of the last and the most important peg on which you can hang the new identity, post-Soviet identity, linking it to the old one, and, at the same time, not completely returning to it.

Nick Schifrin:

What do you believe the lessons are that Putin has taken from the collapse of the Soviet Union and implemented through his policies today?

Vladislav Zubok:

Well, first lesson that he learned was a fiscal and financial lesson. Always have the money, because you always need the money when some kind of economic or political crisis or just instability sets in.

The second lesson, I think he learned from Gorbachev and Yeltsin, never — never project the image of indecisiveness and the inability to use power. And this is the image that Gorbachev left, remarkably, among the Russians, because he had all the power. He just didn't use this power and didn't know what to do with it.

And, of course, never allow the opposition to speculate on the past of Stalinist crimes and so on so forth, or on the existing problems. And, above all, never allow the opposition to find allies in the West, because this is exactly what happened in 1989, '91.

You find amazing coalitions between the Russian democrats and Yeltsin at the time, and, for instance, American Republican right in the United States or some kind of Baltic nationalists, Ukrainian nationalists. So, those transnational coalitions were used to devastating effectiveness to unseat Gorbachev. And Putin is aware of this lesson.

Nick Schifrin:

How does that inform or how does that connect to the kind of crackdown that we have seen even today against Memorial?

Vladislav Zubok:

So, for him, it's a geostrategic problem. It's a struggle for European security border.

And, in this struggle, the past is a very important weapon. If you accept Memorial's version, the Soviet Union and Russia, as a successor to the Soviet Union, must adopt the same kind of policy as Germany adopted, always repenting, always asking for forgiveness to everyone who they call invaded, repressed, and so on so forth, and, in the same time, sort of accepting a marginal and repentant opposition in the new European order.

And this is what incenses him, I believe. And I — he finds the history of Stalinism as a weapon in the arms of his enemies.

Nick Schifrin:

Where does that leave the West today? What should the West understand about the lessons that Putin has taken from the end of the Cold War?

Vladislav Zubok:

If you move NATO or that — and declare that this NATO would be enlarged forever, you have a conflict.

The only kind of tool he sees is moving troops along the Russian border and trying to send this powerful signal to the West.

Nick Schifrin:

Ukrainian officials, today's U.S. government, Western European and NATO officials would say that it is today's Russia, that it is more aggressive by massing those troops on Ukraine's border, and that it is Putin's misinterpretation of history and, frankly, of NATO's intentions today that has increased tensions.

Vladislav Zubok:

Yes. And this is why Putin became so interested in history. He tries to interpret history in his own way.

So, we are in the battle of — over the past. But I would say, as historians, let's continue to fight over the past, rather than to fight on the ground. It's what Churchill or somebody would famously say, jaw, jaw, jaw, not war, war, war.

Nick Schifrin:

Vladislav Zubok, thank you very much.

Vladislav Zubok:

Great pleasure. Thank you.