Russia’s repression replay. Prosecutor General pushes for new review of Soviet era repression victims’ rehabilitation orders

Grigory Vaypan, Senior Lawyer at Memorial

“The beginning of a campaign to strip victims of Soviet repression of their rehabilitation has been officially announced. It’s vile and horrifying,” says Grigory Vaypan, a senior lawyer at Memorial, a prominent human rights organisation that was shut down by the Russian authorities and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the same year, 2022.

Judging by the draft order, it refers to those convicted of treason and aiding the Nazis during World War II, but in reality, these people were never subject to rehabilitation anyway, he emphasises. Article 4 of the 1991 law “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression” does not allow the rehabilitation of those who committed war crimes, participated in intelligence, punitive, or combat actions of the German army or police, or committed violent acts against civilians or prisoners of war.

However, in 1955, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, by a separate decree, granted amnesty to Soviet citizens who “out of cowardice or lack of awareness were involved in cooperation with the occupiers,” including “those convicted of serving in the German army, police, and special German formations.”

Thus, Vaypan believes, the Prosecutor General’s Office is conflating amnesty with rehabilitation. The lawyer calls this “a substitution of concepts and a rewriting of history to suit the current political agenda.” Amnesty provides for release from punishment, but not the overturning of the sentence and rehabilitation. Many of those granted amnesty in 1955 were subsequently not rehabilitated and could not be rehabilitated, Vaypan points out.

He predicts that now the reversal of rehabilitation will threaten all “borderline cases,” where people were forced to cooperate with the occupiers (they were village elders, served in the police, or became informants) but did not commit violent crimes.

“In such cases, in the 1990s and 2000s, the prosecutor’s office consistently rehabilitated people, and this was in accordance with Article 4 of the law on rehabilitation,” the lawyer says.

However, Vaypan does not fear that “mass revisions” are on the horizon: the prosecutor’s office simply does not have enough time and manpower for tens of thousands of cases.

“But there will begin a demonstrative identification and public posthumous vilification of ‘collaborators’ and ‘Banderites’,” he warns. “State media will use these occasions to propagate hatred and war.”

“The very principle is terrible when the prosecutor’s office, many years later, declares that it will overturn its own decisions on rehabilitation,” the lawyer adds. “The state, having previously acknowledged its guilt in the unlawful persecution of a person, now says: ‘We changed our mind!’ Nothing prevents this approach from being extended to any other cases.”

Starting from 1991, the prosecutor’s office systematically studied political criminal cases based on the law on rehabilitation and issued conclusions on them, Vaypan says.

“Now they will take a stack of ‘acquittal’ conclusions and look for flaws in them,” he predicts. “If the prosecutor considers that a person was convicted justifiably, then they can refuse rehabilitation. They don’t need to go to court for this.”

Relatives of the convicted or public organisations will be able to try to challenge these decisions, but the courts in such cases usually side with the prosecutor’s office, Vaypan notes.

Igor Volchkov, Former Employee of the Department for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression at the Prosecutor General’s Office, Lawyer

Lawyer Igor Volchkov, who worked in the department for the rehabilitation of victims of political repression at the Prosecutor General’s Office from 2002 to 2005, suggests that decisions on the rehabilitation of those convicted of “counter-revolutionary activity” under various points of the notorious Article 58 may be subject to revision.

Krasnov’s draft mentions “those guilty of committing grave and especially grave crimes,” Volchkov recalls, and, for example, Article 58-10 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (“Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”) provided for punishment up to the “highest measure of social protection”—that is, execution, he notes.

The lawyer is surprised that the Prosecutor General’s Office plans to review cases concerning people who have long been dead. “They will revise posthumously, repress again,” he says.

Volchkov told Mediazona that when he worked in the rehabilitation department, prosecutors mainly dealt with cases of escapes from places of detention, which were classified as counter-revolutionary sabotage (Article 58-14). In the camps, future fugitives most often ended up there not for political reasons, but for ordinary crimes like theft and robbery. According to the lawyer, such cases arrived in “bags” from the regions where the Gulag camps used to be located.

“Prosecutors would be stationed in the archives, selecting these Article 58 cases and referring them to the Prosecutor General’s Office, which then would refer them to the Supreme Court. The court would re-qualify it to the article on escape and instead of execution, hand down a sentence of three years’ imprisonment,” Volchkov said.

In addition, the rehabilitation department was engaged in the mass “replacement of one certificate with another”: in 2000, the Constitutional Court granted the children of the repressed the status of the repressed, not just victims of political repression, which implied additional benefits.

The prosecutors also checked the compliance of rehabilitation certificates issued in other former Soviet republics with Russian laws. Volchkov recalls that many appeals came from Western Ukrainians deported to the Komi republic in the Russian North. The Prosecutor General’s Office sent a request to Ukraine to find out on what basis a person was rehabilitated, and then issued a conclusion.

“There were both refusals and approvals. Refusals mostly concerned those who fought against Soviet power with weapons in their hands. All the rest were recognised as rehabilitated according to the norms of Russian law,” explains the former prosecutor’s office employee.

In 2005, this rehabilitation department was shut down.

“There was a rumour that the chief told [then Prosecutor General Vladimir] Ustinov: ‘Enough of tarnishing the good name of the state security organs. Why do you even have a department with such a name in your office?’ ” Volchkov recounts.

Darya Khlevnyuk, Researcher of the Politics of Memory, Sociologist

Sociologist and researcher of the politics of memory Darya Khlevnyuk says that if Prosecutor General Krasnov approves the draft order, the consequences for people who study state terror and preserve the memory of its victims will be “most dismal.”

In recent years, researchers have not felt safe as it is. “They had to constantly make certain caveats, avoid saying some things, not bring their work too much into the public eye,” Khlevnyuk admits. Now the authorities are sending “clear signals that it is really dangerous.”

“Some of the victims that museums feature in their exhibitions, who are mentioned in the memory books, whose names are read out during the ‘Returning the Names’ memorial event, will be declared criminals. Potentially, those engaged in preserving the memory of these people are, in one way or another, participating in the ‘justification of Nazism and the falsification of history’,” the researcher warns.

The old version of the Concept for the Commemoration of Victims of Political Repression “had a rather strong symbolic meaning” and allowed work to be carried out in the field, Khlevnyuk says: this document could be shown to regional officials when their consent was required to erect a monument, secure a space for a museum, or hold a school competition.

The updated version of the concept states that “the most significant projects in the field of perpetuating memory” about repression will be completed by the end of 2024.

“In practice, this means that people who are genuinely engaged in this work have absolutely nothing to hope for, because they have been told in no uncertain terms: ‘That’s it, all your work is finished. Now the prosecutor will just come, review some decisions, and you must take a hike’,” the sociologist sums up.

The closure of Memorial in December 2021 was a major milestone in the complete erasure of repression from societal memory, Khlevnyuk says.

Before that, the relationship between researchers of this topic and the authorities was built “on half-hints, there were some steps of tentative rapprochement, like, we will allow this here, but not that there”—work on the memory of state terror “existed, like many aspects of civil society in Russia, in a kind of semi-darkness.”

The shutdown of Memorial represented an “emergence from this twilight state,” and now the authorities are “practically pushing this whole topic underground.”

The sociologist recalls that although in the 1990s “new political elites tried to demonstrate a break with communism,” the conversation about the crimes of the past in Russia began to rapidly fade.

“The state has a certain official policy, certain objectives. The politics of memory is subordinate exclusively to these objectives. The memory of victory in the Great Patriotic War is convenient. Terror is inconvenient, it raises many questions. There can be no national liberation movement [in the occupied territories], it’s all criminal. Everyone loves the Soviet Union because the Soviet Union won the war,” she explains, outlining the logic of the official line.

Darya Khlevnyuk adds that “all over the world, the memory of state terror is ideologically linked with a conversation about democratic values, about not repeating violence and developing support for human rights”—and that is precisely why “the story of Soviet repression turns out to be not very interesting” for the current authorities.

Edited by Dmitry Tkachev