Reassigning Victim Roles: Russian Memory in Flux
Russia is rewriting its history narrative: Gulag museums are closing, monuments are vanishing, and human rights organisations are being proscribed. A new memory regime is emerging in their stead – with the state deciding who qualifies for victim status.
Translated from the German by Hillary Crowe.
On 9 April 2026, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation designated the ‘International Public Movement Memorial‘ as an extremist organisation. Although no organisation with this specific name actually exists, the ruling will make it almost impossible for the human rights organisation Memorial to operate in Russia. Its previous designation as a ‘foreign agent‘ in 2016 and the order for its dissolution in 2021 had already massively curtailed Memorial’s scope for action.
The ruling shows just how closely connected history and politics are in Russia. The already limited scope for remembering the victims of Soviet tyranny has thus narrowed even further. Ever since its founding in 1988, Memorial had lobbied for precisely this cause: for documentation of state repression and remembrance of the victims. In 2022, the organisation was honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize for its commitment. Memorial had also addressed the issue of the perpetrators: a database with information on some 40,000 members of the Soviet secret police caused a particular stir.[1]
‘Genocide of the Soviet people‘
In Russia, there is little willingness to examine the question of who was responsible for and who perpetrated the acts of state terror. Remembrance of the victims, too, is now a private matter, part of family history – but increasingly erased from Russia’s official commemorations. The permanent closure, announced in February 2026, of the Gulag History Museum in Moscow aligns with this trend. The museum, which only opened in 2015, turned the spotlight on the history of the Soviet labour camps and was awarded the Council of Europe Museum Prize in 2021. There are plans to replace it with a 'Museum of Memory' focusing on Germany’s war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. In Russia, this is now known as 'the genocide of the Soviet people'.
Since 2026, denial of a genocide of the Soviet people has been a criminal offence. Russia is thus attempting to co-opt the internationally accepted vocabulary of victimhood that underpins Holocaust remembrance and apply it to the war crimes committed under German occupation. The fact that Germany was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the loss of up to 27 million lives in the Soviet Union is beyond doubt. However, the definition of these crimes as genocide under criminal law and the prosecution of their potential denial are undoubtedly politically motivated. This simultaneously enables the Kremlin to erase any memory of the Soviet role as perpetrator – particularly in the invasion of Poland in 1939. Increasingly, therefore, it is only the victims of German occupation during the Second World War who can still be officially remembered in Russia.
Memorials to Gulag victims are vanishing
These developments are also reflected in Russia’s memorial landscape. On 27 January 2024, marking the 80th anniversary of the lifting of the siege of Leningrad, another monument was inaugurated near Saint Petersburg to commemorate more than one million deaths during the German Wehrmacht’s 872-day blockade of the city. Unlike the memorial sites that have existed since Soviet times, it is dedicated explicitly to the ‘civilians of the USSR, the victims of Nazi genocide during the years of the Great Patriotic War‘. Elsewhere, however, monuments are vanishing. For example, following a municipal decision of March 2026, a statue of the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is to be removed from the main embankment in Vladivostok and placed at a less prominent location – according to the official narrative, because the current site of the memorial, erected in 2015, was selected in a ‘thematically inappropriate‘ manner. During the Soviet era, Solzhenitsyn’s literary works did much to raise awareness of the scale of the state’s system of repression. Monuments that remember the victims of political repression are currently disappearing from other cities as well – in Tomsk, for example.
Divergent voices despite repression
In such a repressive context, it is difficult to introduce different elements into memory culture – but not impossible. For example, the ‘Returning the Names‘ campaign, which was initiated by Memorial and first held in Moscow in 2007, is still taking place. Many of the locally organised rallies at which citizens read out the names of victims of Stalinist terror on the eve of 30 October, the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Persecution, now take place outside Russia. Even so, there are signs that such commemorative events continue to be held in Russian cities. A guide to organising an event can be found on the Returning the Names website. Participants in Russia are advised not to capture anyone’s face on film when documenting the rallies.
The astonishing success of a work of literature also shows that memory discourses cannot be fully controlled by the state. Permafrost, a historical novel by Russian writer Viktor Remizov, published in 2021, won a number of prestigious Russian literary awards and remained on major retailers’ bestseller lists for some time. The novel depicts the construction of the ‘Stalin Railway‘ in the far North of Soviet Russia, which, like every major infrastructure project at that time, relied heavily on camp labour. The author describes in detail the mismanagement, corruption, abuse of power, and the human suffering in and outside the camps. At the same time, he shows that people can still make their own decisions and believe in a better future even under the most dreadful conditions. Permafrost allows sufficient scope for interpretation: while some applaud it for not being an anti-Stalinist novel, others read it as an allegory of the Putin regime. Viktor Remizov himself gives few hints on how to interpret his novel.
Even though the framework for remembrance is prescribed by draconian legislation, other memory narratives continue to exist. In a repressive political system, in particular, the state’s control of the narrative is fragile and vast resources must be mobilised to enforce it. Official memory narratives are still coming into conflict with memories that are passed on within families. Family recollections of the war and repression do not necessarily contradict the official narrative, but neither are they fully subsumed within it.
Silence around countries’ own crimes – not only in Russia
The desire to control history is not a Russian invention, however. The willingness to address and accept contradictions within one’s own past is declining globally. Around the world, populist movements are attempting to erase supposed stains on their countries’ history and foregrounding allusions to moments of national glory. Remembrance of the end of the war will, once again, take up a great deal of space across Europe this year. Yet at the same time, memory continues to evolve: with the deaths of the last few eyewitnesses and the passage of time, more space is opening for state intervention in assigning victim roles.
Nina Frieß is a researcher at ZOiS, where she works on Russophone literatures, Belarusian (exile) culture, and children’s and youth literature. Félix Krawatzek is a senior researcher at ZOiS; he heads the Youth and Generational Change research cluster and the ERC-funded project Moving Russia(ns): Intergenerational Transmission of Memories Abroad and at Home (MoveMeRU).
[1] The original website – nkvd.memo.ru – is currently offline and accessible only via Wayback Machine.