Brazil can still avoid becoming a new Russia, says member of NGO that won Nobel Peace Prize

Known for exposing abuses committed in the Stalinist era, the Russian NGO Memorial received the news that it won the Nobel Peace Prize this Friday (7) with some ambivalence.

Part of the organization feels that it was not able to prevent the biggest catastrophe of all, the War in Ukraine, says lawyer Natalia Sekretareva, 30, who heads the legal department of the NGO’s branch dedicated to the defense of human rights. At the same time, the award has symbolic importance in terms of visibility, since, according to her, the fight for the cause is often silent.

Sekretareva still draws a parallel between today’s increasingly authoritarian Russia and Brazil, about to elect its next president.

“Rights are easily withdrawn, but not [facilmente] granted,” she says. “[Jair] Bolsonaro is made of the same material as Putin or [do ditador belarusso Aleksandr] Lukashenko. Russian society was taught to shun politics, run into the private sphere. But Brazilians can still prevent the country from becoming Russia’s number two in South America.”

The entity was closed in 2021 by a ruling by Russia’s Supreme Court, after years of being persecuted by the government of Vladimir Putin — while the Russian judiciary is nominally independent, in practice it is aligned with the Kremlin.

A new movement of the same name was then created in June, but without a formal NGO registration, a resource to try to escape persecution. One of the bases of the argument used by the prosecutor when asking for the dissolution of the Memorial was that the group systematically violated the obligations of its status as a “foreign agent”, a label attributed to organizations that receive funding from abroad and engage in activities considered political.

Sekretareva says that the new Memorial has a few dozen members, with the main board, responsible for decision-making and of which she is a member, made up of nine people. Many of the activists remain in Russia, sometimes working anonymously.

Others, like herself, left the country — the activist moved to São Paulo in March, shortly after the start of the Ukrainian War, which Russia still calls a “special military operation” after seven months of conflict.

The NGO has two fronts of action. One is dedicated to documenting and safeguarding the memory of political repression during the Soviet years. The other, which Sekretareva is a member of, is centered on the defense of human rights and is subdivided into a series of teams, responsible for dealing, for example, with reports of kidnappings and disappearances of people.

Sekretareva says that one of the organization’s main efforts in recent times has been to help Ukrainian refugees in Russia – often, the territory of Moscow is the only way out for residents of the invaded country.

She says the organization is also on the verge of teaming up with another entity to advise the public on issues related to Putin’s recent mandatory military call-up, the first of its kind since the start of World War II.

Asked how Memorial sees the situation in Russia today, the activist says there is a mix of fear and frustration. “There is a perception that times are dark, and that they will continue to be so. But those who have decided to remain in the organization are also those who believe that times can be better”, says the lawyer, adding that there are people who have literally given their lives for Is it over there.

She cites activist Natália Estemirova, an employee at the organization’s human rights center in Chechnya who was kidnapped and murdered in 2009, in a crime that remains unsolved.