“HE WHO controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past,” George Orwell wrote in “1984”. As Russia’s politics grows more Orwellian, the fight over its past is heating up. The Kremlin’s latest target is Memorial, the country’s most respected human-rights group, set up in the 1980s to commemorate victims of Stalin’s terror.
On October 29th thousands of people queued in a park opposite the headquarters of the agency once known as the KGB to read out the names of some of those whom Stalin had executed. The park features a monument to those victims, a large stone brought from the Solovetsky Islands, site of one of the first Soviet labor camps. Volunteers handed out bits of paper with names printed on them: “Zherebenkov, Dmitry Filatovich, 57, a worker in a cement factory. Executed on September 21st 1937. Zherikov, Semen Nikiforovich, 26, a labourer in a limestone quarry. Executed on March 9th 1938.”
The event has been held annually for ten years, but Arseny Roginsky, Memorial’s chairman, said he had never seen so many people. Ordinary Muscovites kept arriving from 10am until 10pm, undeterred by…
