Ukraine Deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. Russia Needs It.

No one has ever accused the Norwegian Nobel Committee of a surfeit of sensitivity. Thankfully, that trait has been on much greater display in Kyiv.

The decision to award the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize simultaneously to Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian activists—even as Russia is perpetrating a genocidal, imperialist war in Ukraine and aiding Minsk in the suppression of Belarusian democracy—was, by any standard, an affront. Writing with great magnanimity after learning that she and her colleagues had won the Nobel Peace Prize, Oleksandra Matviichuk—director of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties—recalled the Soviet-era slogan, “For our freedom and yours.” “This story is about resistance to common evil, about the fact that freedom has no borders, and the values of human rights are universal,” she said.

But Matviichuk also nodded to the comments of prominent Ukrainian political scientist Volodymyr Kulyk, who was incensed that the Center for Civil Liberties had been forced to share the prize with Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski and the Russian human rights group Memorial. “I am happy that Ukraine has got its first Nobel prize and that one of its best human rights organization has been given this prestigious award,” Kulyk wrote on Twitter. “I also respect the two other recipients. But I hate it that the Nobel prize committee, like many other Western structures and figures, still sees Ukraine as part of the East Slavic trio that needs to be brought to ‘peaceful coexistence’ … by the wise and benevolent West.”

Kulyk, of course, is right. The committee’s decision neatly elides the fact that the Center for Civil Liberties—which has done more than perhaps any other Ukrainian civil society organization to hold governments of all stripes accountable for the lives and livelihoods of ordinary Ukrainians—must now devote attention to Russian war crimes. And it elides the fact that Bialiatski, whose Viasna Human Rights Centre helped Belarusians believe that they could topple their own brutal dictator, is in jail because of the support Russia provides for Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko.

The committee’s decision papers over the fact that Memorial has been an also-ran for years, and that equally dedicated activists in Ukraine and Belarus have, for decades, never really been taken seriously by the committee or the West more broadly. The Center for Civil Liberty’s English-language Wikipedia page was created the day after the Nobel Peace Prize was announced. With admirable exceptions, Western observers have spent much of the past 30 years ignoring Ukrainian and Belarusian civil society, yet it is this civil society that has kept Ukraine and Belarus resilient in the face of war and despotism. Indeed, theirs was a resilience that Russian activists could only envy—and frequently did.

If the prize was penance though, it was poorly paid. As Ukraine fights off Russia with one hand and bangs on Europe’s door with the other, sharing the prize with Russia and Belarus felt to many like being handed a ticket back to the East. Ukrainians, as Kulyk noted, have earned the right to choose their friends, and they are not obligated by history or geography to find common cause with anyone at all.

Yet, there is a wisdom to the committee’s decision, intended or otherwise: The only way lasting peace will emerge in what was once the Soviet Union is if groups like Memorial—not just human rights groups but activists dedicated to coming to terms with the crimes of the past—are successful. However well Ukraine embeds itself in Europe, a Russia that does not recognize the crimes of its distant and recent past is a Russia that will always pose a threat to its neighbors.

It is no coincidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine and his attack on Memorial began at the same time. In July 2014, as the Russian independent news website Mediazona recently reminded readers, Memorial was declared a “foreign agent,” opening it and its activists up to harassment and prosecution—just four months after Russia’s initial interventions in Crimea and the Donbas. Two years later, authorities arrested Yury Dmitriev, a Memorial activist literally unearthing communist-era crimes in the Karelia region, eventually sentencing him to 15 years on trumped-up charges of pornography. Two years after that, Memorial’s offices in Chechnya were firebombed while authorities arrested local Memorial leader Oyub Titiev on equally trumped-up narcotics charges. By 2019, accumulated fines against Memorial and its activists had reached hundreds of thousands of dollars. And on Feb. 28—four days after Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine—a Russian court ordered Memorial closed altogether and its websites blocked.

Since coming to power as prime minister in 1999, Putin has sought to pave Russia’s political landscape in an even layer of asphalt—an effort that extends from tangible things like the media and political parties, all tightly controlled by the president, to intangible things, like ideas and ideologies and memories. To secure his rule, it was never enough for Putin to face no real opposition: He needed a stage devoid entirely of scenery, a plane of continuous, unadorned sameness, in which nothing would separate the past from the present or future.

Putin, of course, was not the only autocrat to emerge after the end of the Soviet Union—but he has been by far the most enduring and, at least in that respect, the most successful precisely because of this homogenizing impulse. Former Ukrainian Presidents Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovych failed to impose authoritarian rule in Ukraine in large measure because they played their roles on a stage crowded not only with other actors but with meaning. Even before gaining independence, Ukrainian society engaged in a conversation about what it meant to be Ukrainian and thus what the meaning of the Ukrainian state was. That conversation continues today. As a result, whenever Ukrainian presidents began to stake claims to unaccountability, they didn’t loom large against a monotonous backdrop, like Putin, but shrank amid the spectacular ambitions that Ukrainians had for themselves and their state. On the Ukrainian political stage, groups like the Center for Civil Liberties were the immutable chorus while would-be dictators were little more than passing players.

Russians, by contrast, never had that conversation about what it meant to be Russian and what the purpose of their state was. With some exceptions at the margins of political and intellectual society, most Russians were handed their post-Soviet state without ever asking for it. The liberal reformers of the 1990s insisted that Russia needed no national idea beyond democracy and the free market. Most ordinary Russians, of course, found little of either, but Russian politics never developed a language in which to talk about itself. In many ways though, Memorial was as close as it ever came.

Founded in the Soviet Union in 1987 by a group of democratic activists and academics, Memorial was based on a simple principle: A country that cannot come to terms with its past will never build a better future. Two years into then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s progressive reforms, Memorial’s activists understood that tomorrow’s freedoms would not be guaranteed by today’s rhetoric. To hold themselves and their leaders to a higher standard, Soviet citizens would need to reckon with the depths to which their state and society had fallen. The centrifugal forces unleashed by Gorbachev meant that 15 countries would have to find their own way through this process. Of all of the legacies Putin inherited from the Soviet Union, Memorial has been the most unwanted.

The story with which Putin took Russia to war—a story of continuous and unabated threats, of eternal and untarnished greatness, and of inherent and unassailable righteousness—can only be told if history itself ceases to exist. People who believe their country has never committed crimes in the past are readier to believe that it could never do so now. Making people believe that—in a country rife with mass graves, where persecutors and persecuted people still live side by side—requires not just rewriting history but erasing it entirely. To deprive Russians of their future, Putin first had to rid them of their past.

There is thus no greater evidence of Memorial’s failure than Putin’s assault on Ukraine—but there is also no greater evidence of Memorial’s necessity. As Memorial’s activists regroup in exile, finding safe harbor for their archives in the West, they hold in the pages of the past the key to Russia’s future and, in some measure, to Ukraine’s. More than Russian dissident Alexey Navalny’s ill-fated crusade against corruption, more than today’s dissidents’ defeated disavowal of this war, the greatest challenge to Putin’s power—power that will be inherited by his successors if Memorial does not succeed—is the idea that Russia’s future must be different from its past.

When groups like the Center for Civil Liberties succeed, Ukraine can hold Russia at bay. If groups like Memorial succeed, Ukraine may not need to.