Human rights activist on resistance: “A symbol of the other Russia”

taz: How can the work of the Russian human rights organization Memorial be continued after Putin’s ban, Ms. Scherbakova?

Scherbakowa: What can a human rights activist do? He can collect facts and present them to the public, thereby exposing lies. This was already the case in the 1990s, during the Chechen war, where crimes against a peaceful population occurred that were never really solved. When Putin came to power, there were more and more political prisoners that we cared for.

taz: What did that mean specifically?

Scherbakowa: To provide them with lawyers, to look after their families, to support them, even in prison. There have been more and more such cases, in 2014 with the outbreak of hostilities in Donbass and now on a massive scale with the war against Ukraine. Part of our work is again to collect facts, firstly for the public and secondly for the possible prosecution of the perpetrators. This is work that we are doing together with Ukrainian human rights activists.

taz: Are there still colleagues who work from Russia?

Scherbakowa: Yes, they still exist – under very difficult conditions, of course. You have the Memorial staff declared foreign agents and now they’re paying fines, for example, for not putting themselves on the Justice Department’s list of foreign agents.

taz: At the panel discussion to the memorial exhibition in Hamburg it will also be about images of Russia in Germany. How do you perceive them?

Scherbakowa: This is a difficult question because these ideas are sometimes very divided. For many Germans, the memory of the incredible crimes in the Second World War, not only but especially in Russia and Ukraine, is very strong.

taz: That wasn’t a given for a long time.

Scherbakowa: But this should not lead to viewing Ukraine as just part of Russian history. And there are still illusions from the Perestroika era that Russia and Putin are actually on the right path, there are sentimental ideas about Russia and Russian culture and of course fear, for example among many people in East Germany, because they had to live under Soviet occupation.

taz: Are the ideas in the West about how much resistance could or should come from the Russian population at the moment appropriate?

Scherbakowa: The question comes from the Ukrainian side: What did you do to prevent this war and what resistance did you offer against the Putin regime? This is a legitimate question for the people who still think critically and who have remained in Russia and for the people who, like me, have emigrated in order not to live in Putin’s Russia.

taz: And the expectations of the West?

Scherbakowa: In my opinion, it is more constructive to put pressure on our own governments to achieve a just peace in this war and not a forced deal for Ukraine. Such efforts have nothing to do with arrogance. But living in Russia you have to have a lot of courage to remain openly critical. This is difficult to imagine in a sheltered existence in Europe.

taz: You have repeatedly experienced dry spells in your work for Memorial. But with exile your situation has changed to a whole new extent. Where do you get the strength to keep going?

Scherbakowa: Memorial must survive and survive somehow, simply as a symbol of the other Russia. Nobody said that exile is a beautiful thingbut I think you have tasks that you have to face in one way or another.