Russian politician Leonid Gozman arrested for calling Stalin ‘worse than Hitler’

Liberal Russian politician Leonid Gozman has been arrested in Moscow for a Facebook post he made in 2020, according to OVD-Info. Gozman is facing charges of equating the USSR’s actions with those of Nazi Germany.

In the offending post, Gozman criticized the Russian authorities’ desire to sign into law the very ban he now stands accused of violating: the ban on comparisons between the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany. “[Actually,] in this case, I want to express support: they can’t be compared. Hitler was an absolute evil, but Stalin was even worse. The SS were criminals, but the NKVD were even more terrible, because the Chekists murdered their own. Hitler unleashed a war against humanity; the communists declared total war against their own people,” he wrote.

Update: On Tuesday, a Moscow court placed Leonid Gozman under arrest for 15 days. At the hearing, according to Ksenia Sobchak’s Telegram channel, the 72-year-old politician noted that he has health problems, but the court decided to send him to prison anyways.

In July, news broke that Leonid Gozman and his wife were facing criminal charges for failing to report their dual citizenship. Gozman’s lawyer said his client obtained Israeli citizenship in 2018 but waited to report it in Russia until after the required deadline.

After the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, Gozman left the country, but he returned in mid-June. He called his decision to leave “a moral decision, not a political one.” In May, he was added to the Russian Justice Ministry’s list of “foreign agents.”

Equating the actions of the USSR’s leadership with those of Nazi Germany and denying the “decisive role” the Soviet people played in defeating Nazism was outlawed by the Russian authorities in 2021. In April 2022, it was made punishable by a fine of up to 2,000 rubles ($32) or up to 15 days in jail.