Russia’s top investigative agency has opened criminal proceedings against a previously unknown employee of the Memorial organization, which before the court’s ban focused on documenting the crimes of Soviet-era communism and protecting human rights. According to state agencies TASS with employees to carry out “rehabilitation of Nazism”.

The investigation is being led by the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, which is under President Vladimir Putin.

According to a spokesperson for the committee, the accusations were based on the fact that the Memorial was also included in the list of oppressed persons who collaborated with the German occupiers during the Second World War.

“The investigation is based on suspicions that a number of ‘Memorial’ employees identified collaborators with victims of political repression and deliberately spread false information about the activities of the Soviet Union during World War II through the media,” the spokesperson said.

Memorial was first labeled a “foreign agent” by Russian authorities in the past. In late December 2021, Russia’s Supreme Court ruled against it. In October 2022, the Memorial Human Rights Center received the Nobel Peace Prize. Russian authorities also dissolved the sister organization International Memorial.

The beginnings of the Memorial date back to the second half of the 1980s, when the idea of ​​erecting a memorial to the victims of communist repression next to the KGB secret service building on Lubyansk Square in Moscow emerged. One of the founders of the organization and its first honorary chairman was academician, dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrey Sakharov.

Memorial collects all available knowledge about Soviet state terror. Since 1989, more than 1,500 monuments to victims of political repression have been erected in Russia, 210 of which are in Moscow. Activists also map the locations of former penal camps – gulags, collect and publish the names of those executed, advocate for the rehabilitation of those who were unfairly prosecuted, but also compile lists of those who were killed in the war in Chechnya or assisted people imprisoned in recent years for positions political.