On this day, 9 October 1975, Andrei Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Strasbourg will honour Anna Politkovskaya with a memorial plaque on 10 October, 20 years after her murder. The unveiling ceremony will begin at 5 p.m. at Place Brant.

Today, October 7, marks twenty years since the murder of Anna Politkovskaya.

What can remembering do? Memory activism uses remembrance as a form of civic action — preserving the stories of people affected by repression and bringing overlooked or silenced experiences into public space.

Arrested in Stalin’s Soviet Union and expelled to Nazi Germany, Ludwig Szymczak became a victim of two dictatorships.

On 29 October, people in cities around the world will read aloud the names of victims of Soviet state repression. #ReturningTheNames #October29

Update: Yuri Dmitriev’s condition On 29 September, Yuri Dmitriev’s lawyer was finally able to visit him in the prison hospital, four days after the 70-year-old historian was urgently hospitalised with a suspected stroke.

On 25 September, 70-year-old historian and political prisoner Yuri Dmitriev was urgently transferred to a prison medical facility with a suspected stroke.

Fragments of resistance and repression across Russia, August–September 2026

🎬 Berlin: Film Screening & Discussion — 27 September On 27 September, Zukunft Memorial invites you to a screening of Mr. Nobody Against Putin, followed by a discussion. 📍 filmkunst66 Bleibtreustraße 12, 10623 Berlin

Peace talks are already underway. But a ceasefire or peace agreement does not automatically bring everyone home.

The history of the Gulag is also a history of the lands on which it was built. Across Siberia and the Arctic, camps appeared on territories that had been home to Indigenous peoples for centuries.

Russia’s war against Ukraine continues far beyond the front line.

Animals were part of the Gulag in ways both ordinary and unexpected Dogs guarded prisoners, horses transported goods, and prisoners raised livestock. Rats, insects and harsh natural conditions made camp life even harder.

“When Europe hesitates, Putin sees this as weakness. And for Putin, what does weakness mean? It means that victory is around the corner and we need to push further.” www.france24.com/en/live-news...

Russia rights group boss fears post-election crackdown

The head of Memorial, Russia's Nobel Peace Prize-winning rights group, has told AFP she fears a fresh crackdown after September's legislative elections, with more people arrested and sent to fight in…

france24.com

🇺🇦 Ukraine declared independence in 1991. But the story did not end there.

Behind the official image of a “happy” Soviet childhood were children trying to make sense of the world around them

How did a centuries-old German community on the Volga almost disappear? On 28 August 1941, the Soviet authorities ordered the mass deportation of Germans living in the Volga region.

It lasted only five minutes, but it became one of the best-known protests in Soviet history. On 21 August 1968, Soviet and other Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, bringing the Prague Spring reforms to an end.

Today, 24 August, we celebrate Ukraine’s Independence Day 🇺🇦

The Moscow Times spoke with Memorial co-founders Irina Shcherbakova and Elena Zhemkova about how Memorial’s work continues in exile — and why preserving individual stories remains essential at a time when the Russian authorities are increasingly rewriting and weaponising the past.

‘Our Work Is About Every Human Life’: How Memorial Preserves the Memory of Repression From Exile - The Moscow Times

For decades, Memorial has worked to safeguard the memory of the victims of Soviet repression and defended people facing political persecution in modern Russia.  Today, one of the country’s oldest huma...

themoscowtimes.com

In 1937, a connection to Poland could be enough to make you an enemy of the Soviet state On 20 August, the Soviet secret police launched what became known as the “Polish Operation” of the NKVD.

Just months of the year — unless one of them happens to carry the weight of a revolution In 1961, Soviet poet Vsevolod Nekrasov wrote a children’s poem based on a simple observation: September, October, November and December all end in the same sound in Russian.

First, their work was encouraged by the Soviet state – later, it was used against them

If you’ve been seeing a lot of apples from Russia lately, here’s why — and here’s another one with its own history of repression

Mass terror can be administered like the Soviet planned economy: through quotas, paperwork, and constant pressure to exceed the plan On 31 July 1937, the Soviet leadership approved Operational Order No. 00447.

What did activism look like before social media? Together with Greenpeace , we look back at how environmental activism became one of the first spaces for civic organizing in the late Soviet Union.

“Moral guilt is something that cannot be assigned to every individual person. It is something each person must feel for themselves”

Documentation is the first step toward accountability. Share this digest We’re back with a new digest from the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group (KHPG) — one of Ukraine’s oldest and most respected human rights organisations, and a member of the International Memorial Association.

One file remained sealed, one sheet was cut, line by line, until it caught the light In Stories We Build, Russian jewellery artist Yanina Kremer begins with an endangered engraving technique.