In December 2021, Russia's Supreme Court ordered the liquidation of Memorial, the country's oldest human rights organisation, founded in 1987 to document and expose Stalinist terror. Ten months later, Memorial was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Taisiya Krugovykh and Vasily Bogatov filmed the process from the inside. We see the court hearings and repression against the supporters of Memorial, the evacuation of the organisation's archive before its Moscow office is seized, and the trial of its co-chair Oleg Orlov on charges of "discrediting the Russian Armed Forces," which ends with his imprisonment. Shot in the tradition of direct cinema, without commentary or voiceover, the film traces the dismantling of Russian civil society through the people who lived it. Both filmmakers have been in exile in France since 2022.

This event is timed to coincide with Irina Scherbakova's visit to London and her talk at Pushkin House on 28 October.

The screening is organised in collaboration with Bertha DocHouse and will be followed by a 30-minute discussion with Irina Scherbakova.

Irina Scherbakova is a historian, philologist and oral historian. She was Director of the Oral History Centre at Memorial and, from 1999 to 2022, directed Memorial’s Russian Annual Historical Competition for High School Students. She has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Bremen and Jena and served as Chair of the Board of Memorial International.

Since 2023, she has been a Board Member of International Memorial and Chair of Zukunft Memorial in Berlin. She is a member of the governing and advisory boards of several German and Austrian memorial and historical institutions, including Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.

Her research and publications focus on the history of the Gulag, women in the Gulag, totalitarianism, historical memory and Ostarbeiter. She has received numerous international awards, including the Goethe Medal, the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Marion Dönhoff Prize, the Hemingway Prize and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bern.

Bertha DocHouse, Curzon Bloomsbury, The Brunswick Centre, London WC1N 1AW