Authorities in Moscow once exonerated people who were tortured, imprisoned, and killed during the Soviet era. The current president wants to undo that.
www.theatlantic.com
Putin Decides That Stalin’s Victims Were Guilty After All
Authorities in Moscow once exonerated people who were tortured, imprisoned, and killed during the Soviet era. The current president wants to undo that.
"Recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government
announced the “rescission” of a 1991 law officially rehabilitating past victims of political tyranny. Beginning in the late ’80s, an efflorescence of truth under the leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin had revealed the full extent of the Soviet Union’s horrific crimes against its own citizens. Ultimately, more than
3.5 million defendants—people whom that now-extinct totalitarian regime had arrested, tortured, sentenced to monstrous terms in the Gulag, or shot to death—were acquitted, in many cases posthumously.
The new move to reinstate charges is ostensibly aimed at “traitors of the Motherland and Nazi accomplices” during World War II, or the Great Patriotic War as it’s known in Russia. But the enormous scope of the operation will almost certainly include other victims of Soviet “justice” during the reign of the dictator Joseph Stalin. Putin’s prosecutor general is moving quickly, having already reinstated the charges against
4,000 people as part of a two-year “
audit.”
... The process of
de-rehabilitation is deliberately murky. According to the British Broadcasting Corporation, the names of defendants and
almost all case records are classified. The courts accept the legitimacy of Stalinist judicial institutions—including “special departments,” military tribunals, and the infamous “troikas” of officials who efficiently sentenced prisoners to exile or death—and original sentences are confirmed without any new corroborating evidence.
Foremost among the likely targets are the
alleged Ukrainian “Nazis”—that is, nationalists who resisted Soviet reoccupation after World War II. The overthrow of their alleged “heirs” in the current “neo-Nazi Kiev regime” was one of Putin’s stated reasons for invading Ukraine. ..."
