The Nobel Peace prize recognises human-rights groups that spoke truth to Putinism

of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was pointed. On October 7th, the day Vladimir Putin celebrated his 70th birthday, the Norwegian committee awarded the prize to a group of people who are engaged in a brave struggle against the oppression that he and his fellow dictator, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, inflict on their people.The prize went to in Russia, Ales Bialiatski, a founder of Viasna in Belarus and the Centre for Civil Liberties in Ukraine. Though divided by geographical borders that have become battle-lines, they are part of a common front in the war Mr Putin started in February. By awarding the prize to those who defend human rights at home, the Norwegian committee has highlighted the connection between international security and civic freedoms.That thought was clearly formulated by Andrei Sakharov, a nuclear physicist who created the first Soviet hydrogen bomb, campaigned for human rights, won the Peace Prize himself and helped to found Memorial in the late 1980s. Freedom of thought and human rights, he argued, are as important in constraining countries from starting wars as nuclear deterrence is. A state that abuses human rights at home will always pose a threat to the outside world, he believed. Mr Putin’s war supports his argument. Its precursors included the shutting down of Memorial inside Russia in December, as well as Mr Lukashenko’s crushing of freedom in Belarus after rigged elections there in 2020. Equally, the power of civil society in Ukraine—represented by the Centre for Civil Liberties, which played a crucial role during the “Revolution of Dignity” in 2013-2014—is one of the underlying reasons both for Mr Putin’s attack and for Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.Memorial—the oldest of the three Nobel Peace prizewinners—emerged as a group independent of the state in the late 1980s, at the height of policies of (openness) and (reconstruction). Its initial goal was historical, to document the crimes committed under Stalin. Every year Memorial staged a mass recitation of the names of some of his millions of victims, read out by thousands of participants.As post-Soviet Russia began to abuse its citizens, first in Chechnya and then throughout the country, Memorial became the country’s best human-rights organisation. Its existence had in itself marked a distinction between the new state and the old terror-wielding one. But Russia’s failure to come to terms with the legacy of Stalinism allowed Mr Putin to shatter that line. By banning the group last year, he made it easier to whitewash the crimes of the past and to commit new ones. “Memorial creates a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state…Why should we, the descendants of the victors, watch attempts to rehabilitate traitors to the motherland…?” a state prosecutor said, chillingly, at the time. “It makes us repent of the Soviet past, instead of remembering its glorious history.” Two months later, Mr Putin had started his war against Ukraine, using Belarus as a bridgehead for his attack on Kyiv. Ales Bialiatski, a Belarusian dissident who helped to set up Viasna (“Spring”) in 1996 to defend political prisoners, was awarded his prize while in jail in Belarus. Having already spent nearly five years locked up in the early 2010s, he chose to return to Belarus in 2020 to take part in mass protests against Mr Lukashenko, who stole the presidential election that year, but managed to remain in power thanks to extreme brutality and the backing of Mr Putin. Members of Viasna, although it was banned in 2003, have been exposing some of the crimes being committed by Mr Lukashenko’s regime against his own people.At the time of the announcement of the award on October 7th, some of the Memorial team were in a Moscow court fighting the government’s decision to seize its building, which contains a unique archive of documents for more than 3m victims of Stalin’s great terror. (Yuri Dmitriev, a historian affiliated to Memorial who uncovered mass graves in Stalin’s gulags, is now serving 15 years in a Russian jail.) Memories and evidence of state crimes are things that both Mr Putin and Mr Lukashenko seek to erase. People who gather evidence and keep memories alive do important work, as the Nobel committee has recognised.