Oleg Petrovich Orlov, 70, is a Russian biologist and activist in various human rights movements since 1988. He is also Chairman of the Board of the Human Rights Center Memorial, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. In 2009 he received the Sakharov Prize. Because of his criticism of the Putin regime, he has been arrested five times since the beginning of the war in Ukraine (photo). Today he will appear before the judge after being arrested in March on charges of “apologetic about Nazism” and “discrediting the Russian armed forces”.
«USSR 1945: the country that defeated fascism. Russia 2022: the land of ruling fascism.”
This cruel but well-chosen slogan is brought to life by a slim little man with a small mustache and white hair. We stand in front of the tricolor stalls set up under the Kremlin wall at the end of April 2022 on the occasion of the glorious commemoration of the “Victory over Fascism” in May 1945. His name is Oleg Orlov, and when he is apprehended by the police moments later, is it’s the fifth time since February 24.
A year later, in March of this year, Oleg Orlov is being searched along with eight other members of Memorial – an organization he co-founded in the late 1980s and which won the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2022 – on suspicion of “apology”. and interrogated of National Socialism”. On the same day, Oleg Orlov was accused of “repeatedly discrediting the Russian armed forces” (a crime punishable by seven years in prison) for his lone and repeated demonstrations against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but most importantly for its publication becomes). , in French on the Mediapart website and in Russian on its Facebook page, a text branding Russia a fascist state. The investigators of the commission of inquiry do not seem to have noticed the contradiction between the two allegations.
Can Russia be considered a fascist state today? In my opinion there is no doubt. But how is it possible, one wonders, that the successor country to the country that defeated German fascism could in turn be conquered by that ideology? The suspicion arises that the germ of fascism was never really eradicated. This is the hypothesis of the great Soviet writer Vasily Grossman, who in his novel “Life and Destiny” – in the words of the author himself – was “arrested” by the KGB when trying to publish it in 1962, and who miraculously survived repression – staged a dialogue between Liss, an SS officer, and the Bolshevik militant Mostovskoj. “When we look at ourselves,” says Liss, “we not only see a hated face, we stare into a mirror.” […] Maybe you recognize yourself in us? […] if you win [questa guerra], we shall perish but we shall live on in your victory. It’s a paradox: if we lose the war, we will win it, and we will evolve in a different form but keep our essence […] You can be sure: anyone who looks at us with horror today will also look at you with horror.”
prophetic words. For over a year, Putin and his propagandists have argued that Ukraine is being ruled by a “Nazi regime” and that the aim of his dirty war is to “denazify” the country. Words that sound empty, it is so clear to everyone which side National Socialism is on. Let us take, as Orlov does in his text, the definition of fascism prepared in 1995 by the official Russian Academy of Sciences at the request of President Yeltsin: “Fascism embodies an ideology and a practice affirming supremacy and exclusivity. ‘ of a particular nation or race, fomenting ethnic intolerance and aiming to justify discrimination against other peoples, denial of democracy, spreading the cult of the national leader, resorting to violence and terror to subdue political opponents and all forms of dissent to silence and advocate the use of war as a means of settling conflicts between states.”
Reading this definition, it is hard not to think of Putin denying the mere existence of Ukraine and the people who call themselves “Ukrainians” and who unleashed a brutal war of aggression in the name of this imperial and ethnic ideology and democracy , which was so laboriously introduced to the country in the 1990s, and which today imprisons, if not physically eliminates, even the most insignificant of its opponents, including teenagers who “liked” a post condemning the war, or the parents of children who do this have drawn a drawing in favor of school peace.
Oleg Orlov, who is due to appear before the judge today, June 8, risks joining Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin and many other opponents of the regime, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in Putin’s gulag. Orlov knew exactly what he was getting himself into when he first stepped onto Red Square on April 10, 2022, holding up a sign that read, “Silence and refusal to know the truth makes us accomplices in crime.” After seven arrests, which combined would inevitably lead to a criminal conviction, friends implored him to leave the country and continue his fight from abroad. That struggle began in 1979 when he took to the streets alone to distribute leaflets against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. But Orlov, like Yashin, Kara-Murza and Navalny, refused to leave his country.
Where does the stubbornness of some Russians come from, who would rather rot in the regime’s jails than flee, even when the authorities give them the right opportunities and even encourage them to do so? The answer is very difficult to formulate and much more complex than a hypothetical “sacrificial spirit” typical of Slavic culture. We certainly find in it a deeply rooted patriotism diametrically opposed to the misleading patriotism of the old slogan “Pust ona ne prav, vsio ravno eto rodina”. “Even if he’s not right, it’s still his homeland,” which I’ve seen on armored vehicles in Chechnya. Men like Orlov, Navalny and many others, who have an intense yet inseparable love for their country, inseparable from a sense of justice, are fighting for what their country should be, not what it is. They know very well that it is up to them, the Russians and no one else, to transform the country, to transform it, to rid it of the virus of fascism, to make it a free and democratic country. And in their utterly Russian logic, they are convinced, rightly or wrongly, that the struggle cannot be waged through desertion and that some will be imprisoned or die, because that is the price to be paid for the freedom of all . And not just for freedom, but to show the rest of the world that the crimes committed in Ukraine, as well as in Chechnya, Syria and elsewhere, were not the work of “the Russians”, but especially “these Russians” This fascist Regime that has seized the country’s power and wealth and oppresses millions of people, forced to follow it out of hatred of others, greed, ignorance, laziness or fear.
For a man like Orlov, going to prison means going where it should be: the only place in his now isolated country where a free man has a right to be. Russians have always been fascinated by the prisoners, the so-called Zeks, the prisoners of the camps: in a country made up of criminal masters and gagged slaves, the latter are the only ones who can maintain a minimum of dignity and are still capable of them even make fun of their oppressors (like Navalny does in his “diary” on Instagram). They may not be able to resist anymore, but they can be rebellious. And their rebellion, which enrages power, has the value of an example. Those who were able to say no and were willing to pay the price are the true representatives of Russia, first in spirit but hopefully one day in practice too. Given such great moral strength, a mafia regime like Putin’s, intoxicated with imperial boasting, might well have them imprisoned or murdered, but it will never be able to silence them.