Belenkin, Nobel Prize winner, reveals the secrets of the Russian NGO Memorial and arrives in Italy
The story of the Russian NGO Memorial, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 for its commitment to defending human rights, is told by Boris Belenkin in his essay “Non lasciare che ci uccidano” (Don’t let them kill us), available in our bookstores on March 19th published by Rizzoli, translated from Russian and edited by Marco Clementi. For the release, Belenkin, founder and head of the Memorial Library until the organization was liquidated in 2022, will be in Italy: on Saturday, March 23rd at 5:30 pm he is one of the most anticipated guests at “Libri Come,” the book and reading festival in Rome, and on March 24th at 6:00 pm he will be at the Memorial of the Shoah in Milan.
From public initiatives such as the so-called “Restitution of the names of those executed,” read every year in Lubyanka Square in Moscow, to the meticulous work of collecting collections from the Archive, Museum, and Library, Belenkin, who now lives in exile away from Moscow, describes the activities and protagonists who worked in the organization, such as Arsenij Roginskij, Jan Racinskij, and Aleksandr Daniel’. He also delves into the violent attacks against Memorial’s building and employees by secret service agents. These events took place after Putin’s third election in 2012 when the government began revising Soviet history and identifying Memorial activists as enemies paid by Western forces.
As a historian, author, and curator of several books and one of the editors of the “Acta Samizdatica” almanac, Belenkin has organized exhibitions on the history of political repression and anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, underground samizdat publications, and recent political history of Russia.
Before the birth of Memorial in the late 1980s to commemorate the victims of repression, the search for historical truth was a clandestine, arduous, and coincidental journey. In his book, the Russian dissident recounts this epochal change that allowed a group of scholars to create a unique organization in the country’s history.
“The endpapers of the book feature a drawing by artist Lilja Matveeva, a member of Memorial who now, like many of us, lives abroad. It is a plan of Memorial’s office in Moscow, on Karetnyj Rjad Street, our largest and final headquarters. When Lilja started drawing the office with its rooms and visitors, there were only a few weeks until the aggression of Ukraine by the Russian Federation and the liquidation of Memorial by a Moscow court, almost concurrent events for punctuality,” Belenkin writes in the prologue.
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