A Russian court has ordered the seizure of Memorial's Moscow headquarters, in a ruling delivered hours after the rights group was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Memorial was announced as a joint winner of the award earlier today, along with jailed Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski and Ukraine's Center for Civil Liberties.
The award, the first peace prize since Russia's invasion of Ukraine this February, has echoes of the Cold War era, when prominent Soviet dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn won Nobels for peace or literature.
The Tverskoy court ordered that Memorial's central Moscow headquarters are to "become state property," the Interfax agency reported.
A representative of the general prosecutor's office accused Memorial in court of "rehabilitating Nazi criminals and discrediting authorities and creating a false image of the USSR".
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Russian authorities have portrayed Memorial as an organisation tarnishing the country's past.
Memorial has documented Stalinist crimes since its creation in 1989, creating a huge historical archive.
The group's headquarters also regularly hosted exhibitions open to the public.
Concerns have grown over the archive's fate and security after the group's dissolution.
Memorial representative Yan Rachinsky said the group had been offered to take the archives abroad but that a decision had been made to keep them in Russia.
"The archive was collected here and people gave us their documents not for us to take them somewhere," he said.
"Our aim is to preserve the archive."
The prize will be seen by many as a condemnation of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his counterpart in Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, making it one of the most politically contentious in decades.
"We believe that it is a war that is a result of an authoritarian regime, aggressively committing an act of aggression," Norwegian Nobel Committee chair Berit Reiss-Andersen said after the announcement.
She said the committee wanted to honour "three outstanding champions of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence".
"It is not one person, one organisation, one quick fix," she said in an interview. "It is the united efforts of what we call civil society that can stand up against authoritarian states and, or, human rights abuses."
She called on Belarus to release Mr Bialiatski from prison and said the prize was not aimed against Mr Putin.
Belarusian security police in July last year detained Bialiatski and others in a new crackdown on opponents of Mr Lukashenko.
Authorities had moved to shut down non-state media outlets and human right groups after mass protests the previous August against a presidential election that the opposition said was rigged.
"The (Nobel) Committee is sending a message that political freedoms, human rights and active civil society are part of peace," Dan Smith, head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, told Reuters.
He said the prize would boost morale for Mr Bialiatski and strengthen the hand of the Center for Civil Liberties, an independent Ukrainian human rights organisation, which is also focused on fighting corruption.
"Although Memorial has been closed in Russia, it lives on as an idea that it's right to criticize power and that facts and history matter," Mr Smith added.
'We don't care' - Russian ambassador
In Geneva, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations said Moscow was not concerned about the award. "We don't care about this," Gennady Gatilov told Reuters.
In Belarus, the award was not reported by state media.
Founded in 1989 to help the victims of political repression during the Soviet Union and their relatives, Memorial campaigns for democracy and civil rights in Russia and former Soviet republics. Its co-founder and first leader was Sakharov, the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Memorial, Russia's best-known human rights group, was ordered to be dissolved last December for breaking a law requiring certain civil society groups to register as foreign agents, capping a year of crackdowns on Kremlin critics the likes of which had not been seen since Soviet days.
Memorial board member Anke Giesen said that winning the award was recognition of its human rights work and of colleagues who continue to suffer "unspeakable attacks and reprisals" in Russia.
The award to Memorial is the second in a row to a Russian person or organisation, after the prize last year went to journalist Dmitry Muratov and to Maria Ressa of the Philippines.
The executive director of Ukraine's Center for Civil Liberties, Oleksandra Romantsova, said winning the award was incredible.
"It is great, thank you," she told the secretary of the award committee, Olav Njoelstad, during a phone call that was filmed and broadcast on Norwegian television.
The group also wrote on Twitter of how proud it was.
The award to Mr Bialiatski could help draw attention to some 1,350 political prisoners in Belarus, exiled opposition politician Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya told Reuters.
"I am really proud to see Ales Bialiatski as the winner," she said in a phone interview. "(He) has through all his lifep rotected human rights in our country.
He is the fourth person to win the Nobel Peace Prize while in detention, after Germany's Carl von Ossietzky in 1935,China's Liu Xiaobo in 2010 and Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest, in 1991.
Ms Tsikhanouskaya said the prize would help attract the attention of ordinary people inside and outside Belarus to look at Mr Bialiatski and his fight.
"He had two missions: independence for Belarus and human rights in all the world," she said.
Von der Leyen salutes 'courage' of activists
EU chief Ursula von der Leyen has saluted the "courage" of the activists.
"The Nobel Prize committee has recognised the outstanding courage of the women and men standing against autocracy. They show the true power of civil society in the fight for democracy," Ms Von der Leyen said on Twitter.
French President Emmanuel Macron said: "Ales Bialiatski, the Memorial NGO in Russia and the Centre for Civil Liberties in Ukraine: the Nobel Peace Prize pays tribute to unswerving defenders of human rights in Europe. As peacemakers, they can count on France's support," Mr Macron wrote on Twitter.
The Nobel Peace Prize, worth 10 million Swedish Krona (€915,425) will be presented in Oslo on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the awards in his 1895 will.
"The Peace Prize laureates represent civil society in their home countries. They have for many years promoted the right to criticise power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens," the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in its citation.
"They have made an outstanding effort to document war crimes, human right abuses and the abuse of power. Together they demonstrate the significance of civil society for peace and democracy."
