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Activist faces criminal charges over article on Kalmyk deportation by Soviet authorities
Photo: Cover of the Narn newspaper, devoted to issues affecting the Kalmyk people
Elista City Court placed activist Boris Todaev under house arrest in a case involving insulting the memory of the defenders of the Fatherland (rehabilitation of Nazism, Part 4 of Article 354.1 of Russia’s Criminal Code). According to SOTAvision, investigators based the charges on an article comparing soldiers of the Third Reich with Soviet military personnel who carried out the forced deportation of the Kalmyk people.
The article, titled In Short Bursts, was published in December 2025 in the Narn newspaper, which Todaev publishes himself, according to Kalmyk human rights defender Valery Badmaev. It quoted an elderly woman who spoke at the opening of a memorial to the genocide of the Kalmyk people in Malye Derbety. The woman described how her entire family had been deported to Siberia.
“Her father was fighting the Nazis on the front lines, while other Nazis, in the form of Soviet soldiers, were deporting his children, his family to cold Siberia. Forever,” the article concludes.
Security forces use the article on the rehabilitation of Nazism both for memes featuring Hitler and for criticism of Soviet authorities and the military. According to human rights defenders, by the end of 2025, almost 500 people had become defendants in such cases. The first person in Russia to be sentenced for criticizing the Soviet Union’s military decisions was Vladimir Luzgin, an auto mechanic from Perm, who in 2014 reposted an article about the joint communist and Nazi attack on Poland.
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