We monitor and draw attention to current events in Russia, anti-war protests and distortions of the Soviet past used to defend an aggressive war. We help our colleagues from Russian memory and human rights institutions (for example Memorial or the original Perm-36 museum) who find themselves in danger from Putin's regime.
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Memorial
We work closely with the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Memorial, a Russian association, which we are helping to maintain operations after many of its associates were forced to leave Russia following the start of Russian aggression against Ukraine. We are personally and administratively connected with the Czech branch of Memorial. Thanks to this, we bring to the Czech environment a number of debates with members of the Memorial, the topic of the abuse of the Soviet repressive history by the current regime, overviews of anti-war protests in Russia, but also stories of Ukrainian victims of the ongoing war. We follow the cases of current political prisoners (among them are Memorial members Yuriy Dmitriev and Oleg Orlov) and also organize letter-writing workshops for these prisoners.
You can find more about all this activity on the website of the Czech Memorial branch.
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Perm-36
We have been cooperating for a long time with the founders of the Perm-36 museum, which was the only museum in Russia on the site of the former Gulag camp and later a prison for Soviet dissidents. In 2014, the Russian authorities took the museum away from its founders (we initiated a letter of protest from Czech institutions), removed the exhibition about dissidents from Ukraine and the Baltics, and began to celebrate the work of the Gulag guards. Since then, we have been in contact with the original founders of the museum, we helped them create the virtual form of the Perm-36 museum and also brought several stories thanks to them:
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UAuction
On the first anniversary of the beginning of Russia's war against Ukraine in February 2023, we organized a charity auction of works of art created by Russian authors, the proceeds of which went to help Ukraine. We collected a total of CZK 123,500. The artworks were originally provided by their authors for the exhibition Sandarmoch - where trees have faces.
Read more about the auction HERE
