Im Steve Gutterman the editor of RFERLs RussiaUkraineBelarus Desk Welcome to The Week In Russia in which I dissect the key developments
I’m Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL’s Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.
Welcome to The Week In Russia, in which I dissect the key developments in Russian politics and society over the previous week and look at what’s ahead. To receive The Week In Russia newsletter in your inbox, click here.
Signs of the times: The Sakharov Center is shut, suspicions settle on the Kremlin as Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin is presumed dead in a plane crash, and Ukraine celebrates the independence it is guarding from relentless Russian attacks.
Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.
Evict And Liquidate
For more than a quarter-century, a modest building in a small park just off the Garden Ring in Moscow served as a kind of oasis of historical truth in a country whose leadership, particularly since Vladimir Putin came to power, has been increasingly dishonest about the past.
It took its name from Andrei Sakharov, the hydrogen-bomb designer turned dissident who fought for human rights and freedoms and died two years before the U.S.S.R. collapsed after a failed coup staged by plotters bent on undoing the reforms he helped usher in and preserving the Soviet Union.
The Sakharov Center, by contrast, worked to preserve the memory of the crimes of the Soviet state and of their victims, who numbered in the millions. One exhibit displayed there featured a large number of faded, dog-eared documents from the time of Josef Stalin’s Great Terror, each including a citizen’s name and a one-word order saying that he or she would be shot.
The coup attempt was over less than three days after it began on August 19, 1991. Almost 32 years later to the day, on August 18, a Moscow court issued a different kind of death sentence, ordering the closure and ‘liquidation’ of the Sakharov Center, which had been evicted from its longtime premises in January.
The shutdown of the Sakharov Center is just one of the latest steps in a relentless campaign by the Russian state to stifle civil society and silence dissent amid the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which reached the 18-month mark yesterday with both sides far short of their goals: in the case of Moscow, the aggressor, subjugating Ukraine, and in Kyiv’s case driving Russian forces out the country.
The clampdown, since the invasion in February 2022 but can be traced as far back as a dozen years ago, when the state suppressed large protests over evidence of election fraud and Putin’s return to the presidency after a stint as prime minister, has become part of the fabric of Russia as he approaches a quarter-century in power.
But that would have been hard to predict when the coup plot collapsed on August 21, 1991, hastening the disintegration of the U.
