Russia bans Memorial

“People had begun to lose trust in the banking system,” says Ozlem Derici Sengul, founding partner at Spinn Consulting in Istanbul. “The decision stopped this.”

Yet the rally had less to do with confidence in Mr Erdogan’s plan than with interventions by Turkish lenders. Since the start of December, Turkey’s central bank has burned through at least $20bn in foreign reserves to prop up the currency, sometimes acting itself and sometimes through stateowned commercial banks. In the two days surrounding Mr Erdogan’s announcement Turkish banks bought $7bnworth of lira.

Regardless of its effectiveness, the new scheme is a big risk for public finances. If a large portion of Turkey’s roughly $300bnworth of private savings moves to guaranteed deposits, a sharply falling currency could put the state on the hook for hundreds of billions of lira. “The system may implode when faced with an exchangerate or riskpremium shock,” says Hakan Kara, the central bank’s former chief economist.

Standard economics would have Turkey raise interest rates to bring down inflation and stabilise exchange rates. But that looks less likely than ever. Mr Erdogan has dug in his heels, ignoring pleas from economists and business groups and invoking an Islamic injunction against usury to justify his eccentric policy.

Loyal media outlets have proclaimed Mr Erdogan’s move a masterstroke, and the government has ways of discouraging sceptics from speaking up. On December 27th Turkey’s banking regulator filed criminal charges against Durmus Yilmaz, a former centralbank governor, and at least 25 others for criticising monetary policy and for other statements it disliked. Mr Yilmaz had accused the president of turning the country into a “laboratory” for crackpot ideas. But other critics are beyond the reach of Mr Erdogan’s enforcers. At a press conference on December 23rd, Vladimir Putin defended the Russian central bank’s recent rate increases. Without them, he said, “we could end up like Turkey.” n

Bungee jump

Turkish lira per $, 2021, inverted scale

Currency-protected lira savings plan announced 8

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Russia Memory hole

Vladimir Putin’s latest attack on historical truth

Russian history is rich in shameful dates, many of them marking show trials and mass executions—or liquidations, as they were then called. December 28th, 2021, should be added to the calendar. On that day Russia’s supreme court “liquidated” Memorial, the country’s most vital postSoviet civic institution, dedicated to the memory of Stalinist repression and the defence of human rights.

Memorial emerged as a group independent of the state in the late 1980s, at the height of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction). One of its founders was Arseny Roginsky, a historian who spent four years in a Soviet prison for publishing a samizdat almanac entitled Pamyat (“Memory”). Another was Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear scientist who created the first Soviet hydrogen bomb and later campaigned tirelessly for human rights.

The group was formally registered in 1990, a few months after Sakharov’s death. The initial goal was historical, to document the crimes under Stalin. Every year Memorial ran a mass reading of the names of some of his millions of victims, read out by thousands of participants. As postSoviet Russia began to abuse its citizens, first in Chechnya and then throughout the country, Memorial became the country’s best humanrights organisation.

Russia’s supreme court is Kremlincontrolled, so its decision was expected. In recent years Memorial has increasingly come under attack, its offices vandalised and its staff harassed. But this did not make the court’s ruling less significant. Memorial paved the way for postSoviet Russia, its embrace of human dignity drawing a line that separated the new state from the systemic terror of the old one.The group’s liquidation has erased that line, making it easier for Mr Putin to whitewash not only the crimes of the past but also those of the present. A day earlier, on December 27th, a Russian court extended the jail term of Yuri Dmitriev, a historian affiliated to Memorial who had uncovered mass graves in Stalin’s gulags, from 13 to 15 years. Prosecutors fabricated charges that he had sexually abused his adopted daughter.

Formally, Memorial was liquidated as a “foreign agent”, an old Soviet term for traitors. The trial resurrected language once used by Stalinist prosecutors. “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 and Nazi collaborators? Perhaps because someone is paying them for it,” proclaimed Aleksei Zhafyarov, a state prosecutor. “It makes us repent of the Soviet past, instead of remembering its glorious history.”

The ruling fell on the centenary of Sakharov’s birth and on the 30th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s dissolution. In his farewell speech on December 25th, 1991, Mr Gorbachev proclaimed a new era when human rights would be treated as supreme: “We have paid with all our history and our tragic experiences for these democratic achievements—and they must not be abandoned, whatever the circumstances.”

Yet unlike the deNazification of Germany, the process of deStalinisation was never enshrined in law. Nor have the crimes of the Soviet state ever been prosecuted. The kgb was renamed and reorganised, not abolished. The securocrats who rule Russia today wrap themselves in nostalgia for the great empire that defeated Hitler. Meanwhile, they gloss over the way it abused its own citizens, and copy some of its methods.

“The liquidation of Memorial is...a message to the elites: ‘Yes, repressions were necessary and useful to the Soviet state in the past, and they are needed today,’” wrote Grigory Okhotin, who founded ovdInfo, a humanrights organisation. The state considers any form of independence a threat. ovdInfo, which uses social media to organise legal help for the victims of repression, has been labelled a foreign agent. Its website has been blocked.

The ruling on Memorial signals a move by the government from limited, targeted repression to something much broader. Internet freedoms are being rolled back. On December 24th a Russian court slapped a $100m fine on Google for “systematic failures to remove banned content”—the largest fine directed at the Western tech giant