Academicians and member scores performed in protest after Bortnikov’s statement

Several dozen academicians, corresponding members and professors of the Russian Academy of Sciences performed in a protest after an interview with FSB director Alexander Bortnikov, in which he directly justified the Stalinist terror. The appeal of scientists on Friday evening was published by Kommersant.

Among the signatories of the document are linguists Vladimir Alpatov and Anna Vybo, physicist Vladimir Zakharov, geologist Yevgeny Sklyarov, astronomer Dmitry Yakovlev.

"Apparently, for the first time after the XX Congress of the CPSU (1956), one of the highest officials of our state justifies the mass repressions of the 1930s and 40s, accompanied by unlawful sentences, torture and executions of hundreds of thousands of our unwinds of our fellow fellow citizens," the appeal said.

The signatures recall the thousands of scientists and engineers who were shot and dead in the camps, the defeat of the command personnel of the Red Army, repressions against millions of other citizens, and deportations of peoples.

“The goal of G. Bortnikov is not clear to us,” the document says. “What is parting words to the new president? Nostalgia in the old times or propaganda of a new doctrine?”

“In any case,” the scientists conclude, “we resolutely protest against the revision of ideas about the inhuman and anti -people's essence of repression and urge all sane people who do not want our children to survive the horrors of the 1930s, to join our protest.”

On December 19, on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the Cheka, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta posted Bortnikov’s interview , almost entirely dedicated to Stalinist repressions. “Although many are associated with the massive factory of accusations, archival materials indicate the presence of the objective side in a large part of the criminal cases, including the foundation of well -known open processes,” said L. Trotsky's proponents of L. Trotsky by the displacement or even liquidation of I. Stalin and his associates in the leadership of the CPSU (B), not invention, as well as, as well as And the connections of the conspirators with the foreign services, in addition, a large number of those defendants in those cases are representatives of the party manager and the leadership of law enforcement agencies, mired in corruption, which repaired arbitrariness and lynching. ”