Photo: AFP

“Memorial” fraudsters rebuffed by the Supreme Court

The belated decision by the Russian Supreme Court to shut down the self-syled “human rights” organization Memorial International will be greeted with relief by all those who draw inspiration from the revolutionary achievements of the Soviet Union and resist attempts to distort the historical record and rob the working class of its own revolutionary history.

Cheered on by the mainstream media and handsomely funded by foreign NGOs, Memorial has dedicated itself to systematically trashing the Bolshevik legacy. According to its diseased perspective, the heroic accomplishments of Bolshevism in transforming society from semi-feudal backwardness to a rapidly expanding planned socialist economy, and in leading millions of impoverished peasants out from bondage to landlords and kulaks and into collective farms, are relentlessly presented as one long night of gulags, executions and torture.

Memorial, founded by the vicious anticommunist Andrei Sakharov in 1989, was given free rein to spread its gloom and despondency unchecked in the national disgrace of the Yeltsin era. Latterly however there has been some pushback, and in 2016 a law was passed requiring foreign funded organizations to register as foreign agents and to flag up social media posts that have been sponsored internationally. It is the deliberate and open flouting of these regulations which led to this welcome Supreme Court decision.

Meanwhile, don’t expect the Memorial activists to be campaigning for the real champions of free speech like Craig Murray and Julian Assange,  banged up in British gaols on trumped up charges for daring to expose imperialist war crimes.