Russia

In this report, FIDH analyses the human rights situation of historians, NGOs, activists, journalists, and other history producers working on historical memory of the Soviet past in Russia. We do so through the prism of what historian Antoon De Baets calls “crimes against history,” a term denoting a range of extreme abuses of history committed by authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. This term has a particular pertinence to Russia, where State authorities have accorded an increasingly central role to historical memory of the Soviet past in self-legitimation and national identity-building, while trampling human rights along the way.