The Ministry of Justice has declared the German "Lev Kopelev Forum" undesirable.

The Ministry of Justice has declared the Lev Kopelev Forum, which has awarded the Kopelev Prize for Peace and Human Rights since 2001, undesirable. The forum is named after the Soviet writer and dissident who spent the last years of his life in Germany.

The Ministry of Justice has added the German Lev Kopelev Forum to the list of foreign and international non-governmental organizations whose activities are deemed undesirable in RUSSIA.

The forum's name appeared today on the list of undesirable organizations on the Ministry of Justice website (under number 147). The Prosecutor General's Office decided to designate the organization undesirable on February 19, according to the ministry's materials. No further details were provided.

The forum is named after the writer and Soviet dissident Lev Kopelev. Since 2001, it has awarded the Kopelev Prize for Peace and Human Rights. The organization was founded by the German journalist Fritz Ferdinand Pleitgen.

Lev Kopelev was born in Kyiv in 1912 to a Jewish family. From his youth, he was involved in the communist movement and a supporter of Leon Trotsky's ideas, for which he was briefly arrested in 1929 during the purges against Trotskyists. In 1933, he entered the philosophy department of Kharkiv University, and in 1935, he transferred to the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages ​​(Department of German Language and Literature). It was then that he began writing.

In 1941, he volunteered for the Red Army. Thanks to his knowledge of German, he served as a translator. When the Soviet Army entered East Prussia in 1945, Kopelev was arrested. According to his own account, this occurred as a result of a conflict with the HEAD of the 7th Section of the Political Department of the 50th Army, who accused him of "propaganda of bourgeois humanism" (Article 58-10). Kopelev's case was heard in December 1946 by a military tribunal, but a year later the sentence was overturned and he was released. Despite this, he was soon arrested again under the same article.

He was initially sentenced to three years in a labor camp, but the sentence was later increased to ten years. The writer was released in 1954 and rehabilitated in 1956. He was reinstated in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1959, he was accepted as a member of the Writers' Union. From 1966 onward, he actively participated in the human rights movement and published samizdat, for which he was subsequently expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Writers' Union.

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On November 12, 1980, with the authorities' permission, he left for West Germany on a one-year exit visa. However, on January 12, 1981, by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship "for actions dishonoring the high title of citizen of the USSR." In Germany, Kopelev taught at the University of Wuppertal and the University of Cologne. At the latter, he was appointed an honorary professor. He died in Cologne in 1997.