Russia quashes rehabilitation of over 4,000 Soviet citizens purged during World War II

Since 2022, Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office has quashed the rehabilitation of at least 4,000 people who were found guilty of treason and collaboration by the Soviet government during World War II, business daily Kommersant reported on Thursday.

Spokesperson for the Prosecutor General’s Office Andrey Ivanov told Kommersant that its staff had identified a number of cases in which individuals had been rehabilitated by the Russian government in the 1990s and early 2000s despite having “betrayed” the Soviet Union during World War II.

Since late 2022, the Prosecutor General’s Office has reviewed more than 14,000 rehabilitation decisions made after the fall of the Soviet Union and overturned more than 4,000 of them in efforts to “identify traitors and collaborators with Nazi Germany”, Ivanov said.

Among those whose rehabilitations were overturned were members of both Russian and Ukrainian nationalist movements deemed to have collaborated with the Nazis against the Soviet government, as well as Soviet citizens said to have “voluntarily” joined either the Wehrmacht or the SS or served in Nazi police units or occupation authorities, Kommersant said.

Ivanov stressed that the Prosecutor General’s Office did not overturn rehabilitation decisions “indiscriminately”, but only after the “thorough study of archival criminal cases and, if necessary, the collection of additional information”.

While there are no precise figures on the total number of victims of Soviet-era repressions who have been rehabilitated, Galina Ivanova, deputy director of Moscow’s Gulag Museum, told business news outlet RBC that the Soviet and Russian authorities had rehabilitated at least 6.3 million people since the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1953, including over 650,000 between 1991 and 2019.

In early September, it emerged that the Russian authorities had significantly rewritten their policy on how the victims of Soviet repression should be remembered. Among other things, it now denies the “mass” nature of Soviet terror and doesn’t name those responsible.

In particular, a passage stating that “Russia cannot fully become a state based on the rule of law and take a leading role in the world community without commemorating the many millions of its citizens who were victims of political repression” was removed from the document’s preamble.

Boris Vishnevsky, the leader of the liberal Yabloko party in St. Petersburg’s Legislative Assembly and one of the few critical voices still to hold political office in Russia, drew attention to the changes, noting that the current wording was “so vague that it’s not at all clear who carried out these repressive measures, who was responsible for ordering them … and who and in what number were rehabilitated.”