Memorial Sankt Petersburg wins Freedom of Expression Awards

Today the president of Memorial Sankt-Peterburg, Irina Flige, got the next mail from London

I am delighted to tell you that the Memorial Archive of St Petersburg has been chosen by Index on Censorship to win our 40^th Anniversary Award at our Freedom of Expression Awards this year. I am writing to send you our congratulations, and say we would be thrilled if you could accept this award in person on Wednesday 28 March at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel in London. Index will pay for a return plane ticket and for 2 nights’ accommodation. We will also try to organise as much press and publicity around your visit as we can.

Index on Censorship is the UK’s leading freedom of expression organisation. The Index Awards recognise outstanding work from around the world to defend the principle of free speech. Your activities at the Memorial Archive have been singled out by Index for their immense courage.  In 2008 we heard of your whole archive of documents and hard disks being confiscated by government authorities on trumped up charges. We have been very interested to hear from Orlando Figes that your work continues with the Virtual Museum of the Gulag and your project to put the archives online. Orlando suggested I contact you and Josephine as the two people most closely involved in this work.

By awarding Memorial’s archive in March this year, we are of course nodding to Index on Censorship’s 40 year legacy, born to challenge Soviet censorship, as a safe house for smuggled materials. In 1972, Index on Censorship was created following an exchange of letters between Pavel Litvinov, one of Russia’s most courageous dissidents, and a number of Western intellectuals in which the extent of Russian censorship was fully revealed.

Forty years on, as Index on Censorship celebrates its anniversary, this will be a rare opportunity  for us to reward Russia’s Memorial Archive in its attempt to defend freedom of expression where it is most at risk.

We would be honoured if you would agree to come to London for the ceremony on Wednesday 28 March.Unfortunately I will be out of the country in the next 2 weeks but my colleague Mike Harris, copied into this email, is available to answer any questions you might have regarding your visit and the Award itself.

I look forward to continuing contact with you when I am back in London on 27/02.