Police raid Stalin-era files in 'war over memory'

Moscow: One hundred thousand witnesses to the terror of Joseph Stalin's rule are stored on 12 computer hard disks compiled by Memorial, a Russian human rights group based in St Petersburg.

Several terabytes of data include thousands of hours of audio histories, digital versions of faded photographs, video evidence of mass graves. One could easily retrieve a faded denunciation written by a son against a father, or hear a ghostly voice reciting a forced confession or naming her "co-conspirators".

It is the most complete public record of one of the most terrifying periods of modern human history, and mysteriously, it was also the target of a raid by Russian police on Memorial's headquarters on December 4.

Irina Flige, director of Memorial's office, says the police raid was not an accident or a case of mistaken identity.

She believes that Memorial's in exposing and publicising Stalin's crimes has become the target of a government effort to whitewash the past and justify in theoretical terms the continued existence of a strong authoritarian state. "It is a war over memory," she says.

Police have still made no public statement on the raid. They said they were after information about an article that was published in an extremist newspaper, which Flige says Memorial knows nothing about.

Flige says the only thing they were interested in was the computers. "They knew what they were looking for," she says.

She says she has no proof that the raid was a deliberate attempt to intimidate her organisation, only a series of coincidences: it happened the day before a three-day conference in Moscow devoted to Stalin's memory, the first ever in Russia, which was organised jointly by Memorial and the Yeltsin Fund.

It also coincided with an unprecedented public offensive against groups such as hers by Kremlin-backed intellectuals who charge Memorial with distorting Russia's history in order to undermine Russian patriotism.

Prime minister Vladimir Putin told teachers last month to teach Russian history in a positive light.

- Financial Times