Memory Laws in Russia
Legal action against freedom of expression in Russia is incompatible with international human rights law on freedom of expression, a concern expressed in numerous reports by human rights monitoring bodies such as the Council of Europe`s Venice Commission and NGOs such as the International PEN Club. 30European Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission), Opinion No. 981/2020, 18 June 2020, “Russian Federation. Opinion on the draft amendments to the Constitution of the Russian Federation (signed by the President of the Russian Federation on 14 March 2020) on the execution of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights in the Russian Federation. Specific memory laws – such as the amendments to the Russian criminal code adopted in 2014 and the constitutional amendments adopted in 2020 – are the threads of a more vivid tapestry of regulations. Over the past two decades, Putin has mobilized the country`s remembrance policy to serve his own political interests. The Russian government violently bent the arc of the country`s historical narrative to weaken the individual voices of those who suffered the Great Terror, while glorifying the Soviet Union`s role in the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. This narrative was even written into the Russian constitution in 2020. (b) “War crimes” (“violations of the laws or customs of war”, including “murder, torture and enslavement of civilians in occupied territories; murder or torture of prisoners of war”, etc.) In Russia, the situation is quite different. We do not yet have an established democracy, public opinion is weak, professional associations of historians exist only on paper, and the judiciary is by no means independent. If leaders, particularly in the provinces, want to use a law of remembrance to settle scores with historians whose faces “don`t match” for whatever reason, colleagues are unlikely to band together in their defence or for a court to show understanding. In this context, we should refrain from enacting laws of remembrance.
According to the European Convention on Human Rights, states must ensure a free and open debate on the past. But with the advent of memory laws, the right to freedom of expression is threatened. In Russia, it is tempting to assume that Stalinism was essentially a matter of management. The famine in Ukraine was an administrative mistake. The terror of the late 1930s was an unfortunate mistake. The alliance with Hitler was a geopolitical necessity. To Americans, these Russian justifications seem ridiculous because we have no guilt or shame about the events in question, no emotional interest in being innocent, no connection to the narrative. We have no problem seeing that famine, gulag and terror were nothing but administrative excesses, and we cannot easily ignore an alliance with Hitler. Conversely, anyone who looks at the United States from the outside immediately sees that our new memory laws protect the legacy of racism. We delude ourselves. The laws of memory emerge in a moment of cultural panic when national politicians suddenly rise up against “revisionist” teachings.
In Russia, so-called revisionists are people who write criticisms about Stalin or honestly about World War II. In the United States, “revisionists” are people who write about race. In both cases, “revisionism” tends to refer to those parts of history that defy the leaders` sense of justice or make their followers uncomfortable. The France is the classic example of a country that prefers the laws of memory. In recent years, French colleagues, united in “Freedom for History”, have managed to persuade their government to stop publishing commemorative laws. Public pressure led to the cancellation of the last of them. The France is also one of the oldest democracies: public opinion is highly influential, there is a tradition of debate about the past, academic and civil liberties are deeply rooted, and the judiciary enjoys a great deal of autonomy. Memory laws are unlikely to cause significant harm.
