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The Shuttering of Memorial, A Russian Human Rights Group
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Panel Discussion
Admission: Free |
In January 1989 in Moscow an NGO called Memorial was founded to document and publish the crimes of the Soviet regime. In two recent rulings by the Russian Supreme Court and Moscow's City Court, Memorial has been ordered to shut down. Russian prosecutors shuttered Memorial based on claims that it defied Russia’s “foreign agents” law and stoked support for extremists. Historians and international diplomats are calling this an attack on civil society and human rights. Join YIVO for a conversation discussing Memorial, and the meaning of the Russian government's actions with YIVO’s Executive Director Jonathan Brent, journalist and author Masha Gessen, Russian researcher and independent journalist Grigory Okhotin, and author Anna Nemzer.
About the Speakers
Masha Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of twelve books of nonfiction, including The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the National Book Award in 2017, and, with photographer Misha Friedman, Never Remember: Looking for Stalin's Gulag in Putin's Russia.
Anna Nemzer is a Russian journalist, writer, documentary filmmaker and TV-presenter on the TV-channel Dozhd' (TV-Rain), the only independent TV-channel in Russia (which was recently entered in the register of "foreign agents"). The main focus of her works is historical memory.
Gregory Okhotin is co-founder of OVD-Info, an independent Russian human rights media project aimed at monitoring and preventing politically motivated persecution. From 2014-2018 he was a member of the board of International Memorial. From 2001-2011 Okhotin worked as journalist for Polit Ru, the newspaper Vedomosti, the Bolshoi Gorod, and RIA Novosti.
Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.