Russian authorities raid homes of Memorial employees in connection with ‘rehabilitating Nazism’ charges

Russian law enforcement officers searched the homes of multiple employees of the human rights group Memorial on Tuesday morning in connection with felony charges of “rehabilitating Nazism” that were filed against the organization earlier this month.

According to the outlet OVD-Info, police went to at least six homes. Memorial’s lawyer, Arseniy Levinson, told Novaya Gazeta that officers searched the homes of Memorial employees Oleg Orlov, Nikita Petrov, Yan Rachinsky, Alexandra Polivanova, and the latter’s mother, Marina Polivanova. Other sources reported that police also searched the homes of Galina Iordanskaya, Alena Kozlovaya, Irina Ostrovskaya, and Alexander Guryanov.

After the charges against Memorial were filed, a law enforcement source told the state news outlet TASS that the Russian authorities suspect that Memorial included “individuals who collaborated with fascists” during World War II on a list of repressed people.

Memorial, one of the winners of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, was founded in 1987 to study political repression in the USSR and to rehabilitate its victims. A Russian court liquidated the international Memorial organization in 2021, and the Russian authorities confiscated Memorial’s Moscow office space in 2022.