Russia is increasingly ruled by an authoritarian regime. Soviet dictator Stalin is also coming back into fashion. Now an authority has rebranded many citizens who were later rehabilitated as victims of Stalin as traitors.
Amid increasing repression against civil society, Russia has revoked the rehabilitation of more than 4,000 victims of the purges under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Since 2020, the Prosecutor General’s Office has found a number of cases in which people who committed treason during World War II were rehabilitated in the 1990s and early 2000s, the agency’s official representative, Andrei Ivanov, told the Kommersant daily.
According to Ivanov, those who were previously rehabilitated were men and women who had cooperated with the Nazis. Some of them had voluntarily joined the Waffen-SS or the auxiliary police troops or had worked in the self-government bodies set up by the Nazis, the official said.
Joseph Stalin was in power in Moscow from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. His rule saw several waves of repression. The largest lasted from 1936 to 1938 and was known as the Great Terror or, more euphemistically, as the Stalinist purges. But even during and after the Second World War, which the Soviet Union entered after the German Wehrmacht invaded the country in 1941, people suspected of collaborating with the Nazis were executed or sent to prison camps. Many of these victims were later rehabilitated after thorough investigations.
Source: Stern
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