[3] A movement rather than a unitary system, as of December 2021 Memorial encompassed over 50 organizations in Russia and 11 in other countries, including Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Germany, Italy, Belgium and France.

[5] Memorial emerged during the perestroika years of the late 1980s, to document the crimes against humanity committed in the USSR during the 20th century and help surviving victims of the Great Terror and the Gulag and their families.

Some of the oldest branches of Memorial in northwest and central Russia, the Urals and Siberia later developed websites documenting independent local research and published the crimes of the Soviet regime in their region.

[11] The Memorial Human Rights Centre was ordered shut by the Moscow City Court on 29 December 2021; state prosecutors accused it of breaching the foreign agent law and supporting terrorism and extremism.

On the same day, the European Court of Human Rights applied an interim measure instructing Russia to halt the forced dissolution of Memorial, pending the outcome of litigation.

[18] This took place within the context of perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness), policies pursued by president Mikhail Gorbachev which led to increased government transparency and tolerance of civil society.

Some of these goals became feasible in the late 1980s when several activists such as Lev Ponomaryov, Yuri Samodurov, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Dmitry Leonov, and Arseny Roginsky proposed a complex to commemorate the victims of Stalinism.

[28] The exiled Solzhenitsyn was also named but he declined the invitation, saying he could do little to help from abroad; in private, he told Sakharov that the scope of the project should not be restricted to the Stalin era because repressive measures had begun with the October Revolution under Vladimir Lenin.

[30] On 19 April 1992, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Memorial was reconstituted as an International NGO, a "historical, educational, human rights and charitable society",[31] with organizations in several post-Soviet states (Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Georgia), as well as in Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy,[32] and France.

Moscow Memorial was among the organisations that persuaded the Russian authorities to follow the long-standing dissident tradition of marking 30 October each year,[35] transforming it into an official Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions.

Today these include the Last Address project and, following the example of Berlin and its Topography of Terror excursions and exhibitions, the society has organised similar educational ventures about the Soviet era in Moscow and other Russian cities.

[34] Another project is the "Open List" database, created in several languages of the former Soviet Union (Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian and Belarusian) to encourage relatives and descendants of those shot, imprisoned and deported to contribute information about the victims and their families.

It includes the killing fields of the Great Purge such as Krasny Bor, the abandoned burial grounds of the Gulag, and also 138 graveyards of the "special" settlements to which "dekulakized" peasant families and then Poles, Lithuanians and others were deported in their tens of thousands.

In July 1997, a joint expedition of the St. Petersburg and Karelian Memorial Societies led by Dmitriev, Irina Flige, and Veniamin Joffe found 236 common graves containing the bodies of at least 6,000 victims of Stalin–era purges, executed in 1937 and 1938.

This included the documentary The Crying Sun (2007), which focused on the village of Zumsoy in Chechnya, and the struggle of its citizens to preserve their cultural identity in the face of military raids and enforced disappearances by the Russian army and 'guerilla' fighters.

[68] Quoting the RLA jury: "for showing, under very difficult conditions, and with great personal courage, that history must be recorded and understood, and human rights respected everywhere if sustainable solutions to the legacy of the past are to be achieved."

[70] Announcing the award, President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek said that the assembly hoped "to contribute to ending the circle of fear and violence surrounding human rights defenders in the Russian Federation".

[70] Oleg Orlov, a board member of Memorial, commented that the prize represents "much-needed moral support at a difficult time for rights activists in Russia".

[81] This demanded that all legislative acts and other documentation that "served as the basis for mass repressive measures and violations of human rights" should be declassified and made publicly available within three months.

[83] Krivenko was an academic and a founding member of Memorial,[22] while Prudovsky began by researching the fate of his grandfather and has spent the last ten years on a wide-ranging study of political repression in the 1930s.

Director Irina Flige thought Memorial was being targeted because it was on the wrong side of Putinism, specifically the idea "that Stalin and the Soviet regime were successful in creating a great country".

[51][90] Allison Gill, director of Human Rights Watch in Moscow, said, "This outrageous police raid shows the poisonous climate for non-governmental organisations in Russia […] This is an overt attempt by the Russian government […] to silence critical voices".

[51] On 20 March 2009, the city's Dzerzhinsky district court ruled that the December 2008 search and confiscation of 12 HDDs were carried out with procedural violations; the actions of law enforcement bodies were illegal.

[94][95] Activists linked to Memorial played a key role during the first Chechen conflict (1994–1996) when Russia's human rights ombudsman Sergei Kovalyov spent days in Grozny under bombardment by federal aviation.

On 4 October 2016, the law requiring organizations that accepted funds from abroad and engaged in "political activities" to register and declare themselves as a "foreign agent" was applied to Memorial International.

The Research & Information Centre at Petersburg Memorial declared that it would continue its work and projects but "did not intend to mark all its publications with such a stamp", designating it a foreign agent.

[106] In its 2015 annual "foreign agent" audit, Russia's Ministry of Justice accused the Memorial Human Rights Centre of "undermining the foundations of the constitutional order of the Russian Federation" and of calling for "a change of political regime" in the country.

[104] By autumn 2019, Memorial and its new chairman, Yan Rachinsky, faced fines of 3,700,000 roubles for infringing the terms of the foreign agent law: a sum that was raised through crowdfunding.

But the body continues to campaign vocally on social media, and the Nobel Prize committee hailed its efforts to document war crimes and other abuses of power.

[11][12] This was followed by the application of an emergency interim measure by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), ordering the Russian government to halt the abolition of the two organisations.