This article was originally published by Coda’s editorial partner EurasiaNet.

History is now such a sensitive subject in Russia that education officials have disrupted a prestigious competition for high school students, cautioning that doing original research and writing about the Soviet past threatens to turn children into “extremists.”

The annual competition, titled “People in History: 20th Century Russia,” is sponsored by Memorial, a civil rights organization that strives to shed light on Soviet-era totalitarian excesses. The group enjoyed broad popularity in Russia in the 1990s for its efforts to document the devastation wrought by Stalinism on Soviet citizens. Over the past decade, however, Russian leader Vladimir Putin has taken a dim view of Memorial’s efforts to promote a comprehensive account of the past. Accordingly, the organization’s international wing was branded in 2016 as a “foreign agent.”

Memorial launched the essay-writing contest in 1999. It is open to high-school-age students, with entrants submitting an original historical essay, based on personal testimony gathered from relatives and others, and supported by archival research and primary sources. The competition is aligned with Memorial’s central mission to promote “the revelation of the truth” about the Soviet Union’s legacy of totalitarian abuses. It quickly developed into one of the largest competitions of historical research in Russia, with an average of about 2,000 entries every year. The writers of the top 40 essays are invited to attend the awards ceremony.