Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you today. Founded in 1989, the “Memorial International Historical, Educational, Charitable, and Human Rights Society” put its first focus on witnesses and victims of political repression. When initiating a students’ history competition in 1999, we began working directly with young people. This became an important turning point in Memorial’s educational work and shaped our activities for nearly three decades.

Almost twenty-five years have passed since then, but I still remember very clearly how we read those first entries. We received works from villages and small towns that we had never even heard of.

At the time, none of us at Memorial really knew what fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds thought about the Soviet past. They were, in fact, the first generation to grow up in a much freer society. I was afraid that we would receive mostly traditional school essays written in the old Soviet style. I thought that if this happened, the whole idea of the competition would be meaningless. But fortunately, I was wrong.

Of course, even ten years later, the influence of the Soviet past was still very strong. This was especially true in the regions – in villages and small towns, and in everyday family life. But life had changed there too. And we could see this change. What we found was as diverse and contradictory as the way young people understood the past at that time.

In the early 2000s, the old Soviet school system had already collapsed. But Putin’s new political agenda had not yet fully taken shape. You could feel that freedom had entered even such a conservative institution as the school.

I was also surprised by how openly they wrote about their family members and about the recent past. They sent us not only small fragments of memory that remained in the minds of older generations. They also sent us long and detailed family stories. These family stories and biographies from twentieth-century Russia were often full of silence, hidden facts, and distortions.

And our participants wanted to finally know the truth. Who were their ancestors? And what had happened to them? For young people, it was difficult to imagine that under Soviet rule it was sometimes safer to have no relatives at all. Anyone could become dangerous simply because of their family background. Perhaps they had the “wrong” social background. Perhaps they belonged to the “wrong” nationality. Perhaps they had relatives who were considered dangerous. Or perhaps they themselves had taken part in something that the Soviet authorities considered suspicious.

For adults who helped young people with their research, this was also a chance to create – or regain – a real identity through their family roots. Many people from older generations had lived behind the mask of an invented “Soviet person.” Behind this mask, they could hide. But in the early 1990s, this mask seemed to disappear. And our competition became proof of this change. However, researching family history in Russia required enormous effort. First, participants had to find out which archive they should contact. At that time, the internet was still inaccessible to many people. They had to speak to witnesses and travel to different places to look for traces of the past. In those years, this was very difficult. Many families simply did not have enough money.

It was also difficult to recover memories that their ancestors had pushed out of family consciousness for decades. But we saw that persistent research often brought results. Documents were found in archives. Names were discovered. Lost relatives were found. Forgotten graves were located. And all this was done in order to restore traditions – family traditions, national traditions, social traditions, and religious traditions.

From around 2005, we began to see more clearly that Putin’s growing nationalist and falsely patriotic agenda was increasingly affecting schools. Our participants found themselves caught in a conflict between their own private – and often tragic – family histories and Putin’s false patriotism. Of course, this was connected with the state’s historical policy. A new policy of nationalist patriotism was developing. The main idea was simple: people were supposed to feel pride in a glorious past. The image of Russia’s great past was being used once again. And today’s Russia was presented as the heir to this past.

The memory of the Great Patriotic War – or, more precisely, the memory of victory – played an important role in creating a positive image of Soviet history. This myth was based on national pride and resentment. Stalin was placed back on a historical pedestal. He was no longer presented mainly as a cruel dictator and the organizer of mass terror, as he had been during Perestroika. Instead, he was presented as the victor of the Second World War, a man who expanded the borders of the country and, above all, as a symbol of strong authoritarian rule. The question of the price of this victory was hardly ever asked.

Victory Day, on May 9 in Russia, increasingly became not a day of “Never Again,” but a demonstration of military power and a celebration of militarism. Military parades became the main focus. They were joined by empty symbols that had little to do with the real memories of the war. Everything that did not fit the glorious myth was supposed to disappear from the public image of the war.

In the end, laws were adopted to protect Putin’s official view of the past. It became illegal to publicly question the role of the Soviet Union in the victory. It also became illegal to compare Stalin’s dictatorship with Hitler’s regime. As anti-American and anti-Western sentiments grew, new images of enemies were created.

The democratic movement of the Perestroika period – which led to the liberation of Eastern European countries from Soviet influence, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the creation of independent states – was now presented in Russia as a series of defeats.

History – especially Russian history – is unfortunately something that strongly interests Putin.

The use of history as a political tool now plays an important role in the war against Ukraine. When this new turn in historical policy began, Memorial – and especially the school competition – became suspicious in the eyes of the authorities. Teachers and students began to experience increasing pressure and interference from the state.

Students and teachers who came to Moscow for the award ceremony were insulted and attacked by activists from far-right organizations. This happened in front of the police. Federal television channels broadcasted defamatory reports about the competition and its participants. The organizers from Memorial were called, in the worst traditions of Soviet propaganda, “traitors” and “anti-patriots.” We were accused of “rewriting history with foreign money.”

In all the regions where the winners of the competition lived, their teachers, parents, and often the students themselves were called to meetings with school principals. There they met people who introduced themselves as employees of local education departments, regional administrations, or openly as representatives of the FSB. They demanded to see the students’ work and strongly recommended that people stop cooperating with Memorial.

After the Russian annexation of Crimea, which Memorial publicly protested against, Memorial was declared a “foreign agent.” From that moment on, our work with school students became more and more difficult. This, of course, also had a strong negative effect on our participants, just as it did on many other educational initiatives. But, to our surprise, we also saw resistance to this pressure. Despite everything, school students and teachers stayed with us until the very end. In 2021, International Memorial was liquidated by the Supreme Court.

And it is important to mention that, according to the prosecutor, one of the main accusations against us was our attempt to influence young people. We were accused of presenting them with a negative and “unpatriotic” image of our past. After the liquidation, we were forced to close the competition.

After the beginning of the full-scale war against Ukraine, and after our work was banned, many of us were forced to leave Russia. Emigration is a very difficult experience, especially when nobody has prepared for it. From the very beginning, Memorial had been a symbol of public struggle for the memory of political repression and for human rights. And when our work became impossible in Russia, we became even more convinced that we had to continue.

This conviction became even stronger after Memorial, together with the Ukrainian organization Center for Civil Liberties and the Belarusian human rights defender Ales Bialiatski, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. With the support of  Körber-Stiftung, we created a new organization in Berlin, Zukunft Memorial, in order to continue our educational work, preserve our archives, document evidence of the crimes that the Putin regime is committing today, and resist the Putin regime’s instrumentalization of history.

Because today, the education system in Russia is under enormous pressure. Militant nationalism and militarism are now being promoted even in kindergartens. New history textbooks have fundamentally changed the way Russian history is presented. The West is constantly described as the source of moral and cultural decline. Throughout the new textbook—which is now required in schools—the same idea appears again and again: The West is responsible for all Russia’s problems. Russia has always been surrounded by enemies. All reformers, including Gorbachev, are presented in a negative light. Ukraine is mentioned only in connection with the war, which is still officially called a “special military operation” in Russia.

And what is most frightening is that schoolchildren are not supposed to understand the scale of the terrible aggression being carried out against Ukraine, or the conditions in which Ukrainian schoolchildren have now been studying for more than four and a half years—under constant shelling. Nor are they supposed to know how many Ukrainian children have already been killed in this criminal war.

Wars and dictatorships connected many different peoples in Europe in tragic ways. Millions of people became victims of deportations and political repression. There were also many stories of people who had lived under communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

From the very beginning, we saw our project and our approach to history as part of a broader European project. That is why it was so important for us to become part of the European network EUSTORY. And the expansion of our competition beyond national borders in exile has made us feel even more strongly connected to EUSTORY than we were before our emigration.

I remember many wonderful moments of our cooperation. Our regular meetings with organizers of history competitions from other countries, also in Lviv and even Moscow. Within EUSTORY, participants of the Polish competition at some point came to Moscow to meet Russian participants. Together, we travelled to places connected with the execution of Polish prisoners of war who had been taken into Soviet captivity in 1939 and were later murdered in what became known as the Katyn massacre. We worked together on these tragic pages of our shared history. Today, it is almost impossible to imagine such cooperation.

But we very much hope that our work together with all of you – our shared effort to resist Putin’s aggressive instrumentalization of history and memory, and the transformation of both into weapons of hatred and war propaganda a – is our contribution to our common struggle for historical truth.