Moscow’s Plan to Revisit Rehabilitation of Soviet Era Repression Victims Likely to Prove Explosive, Grashchenkov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 10 – Russian prosecutors plan to reopen the question of the rehabilitation of victims of Soviet era crimes, a plan that will at the very least reopen old wounds because so many people were directly or indirectly involved and because many will draw parallels between repression then and repression now, Ilya Grashechenkov says.

            The director of the Moscow Center on Regional Politics argues that the plan, which is intended to ensure that no one who supported the Nazis was rehabilitated (rbc.ru/politics/09/09/2024/66df460a9a79473380608274) will inevitably raise questions about others as well (rosbalt.ru/news/2024-09-10/ilya-graschenkov-k-chemu-privedet-peresmotr-del-o-reabilitatsii-zhertv-repressiy-5190631).

            According to historians, on the order of 20 million people were repressed during Soviet times, but only a few more than 630,000 have been rehabilitated since the end of Soviet times, the scholar says. The cases of 340,000 more were considered but the authorities decided not to rehabilitate them.

            But these are miniscule figures given that specialists say that as many as 11 million Soviet citizens could qualify for rehabilitation. Consequently, any effort to review even the small number who have been rehabilitated to ensure they followed Moscow’s approach on fascism will touch a nerve among the twice that number of Russians today with direct links to them.

            Perhaps still more dangerously, such a review, Grashchenkov suggests, will reopen questions about the Soviet state and its role in all this, questions that will soon grow to include others about the actions of its successor Russian state as well.