Russia tightens persecution of a crucial human-rights group

The raids began at seven o’clock on the morning of March 21st. Armed police brigades of a dozen men each descended on twelve Moscow addresses and turned them upside-down. Where they found documents, they sealed them. Where they found computers, they confiscated them. Where they found spirits, they drank them. The targets of the raids were not typical criminals, but eight soft-spoken intellectuals, several of them elderly, who work for Memorial, a human-rights group now banned in Russia.

The eight were detained for questioning on charges of supposed “rehabilitation of Nazism”, which can carry up to five years in jail. The case being cooked up against them is trivial: Memorial databases documenting victims of Soviet political terror accidentally included three actual Nazi collaborators among more than four million other names. The databases have long embarrassed Russia’s secret services, which consider themselves the heirs of the KGB. But the investigating officers were also interested in matters unrelated to history, says Alexandra Polivanova, one of the eight Memorial employees: “They asked about Alexei Navalny and Ukraine, for whatever reason.”