Meduza’s daily newsletter: Thursday, September 19, 2024 Why Russia is suddenly overturning thousands of WWII-era amnesties, key suspect in Team Navalny’s bombshell report is arrested in Poland, and the Kremlin resorts to the worst A.I. music you ever heard

Russia’s Prosecutor General opens new front against ‘collaborators’ and ‘Banderites’

On Thursday, the newspaper Kommersant reported that Russia’s Prosecutor General has reviewed more than 14,000 “rehabilitations” of supposed war criminals in World War II and overturned these decisions in more than 4,000 cases — all in the past two years. The news follows government amendments introduced this June that modified Russia’s “Concept for Memorializing [Soviet] Political Repression Victims” by downplaying the “mass” nature of these repressions and affirming that Soviet officials mistakenly amnestied real traitors in 1955 who collaborated with the Nazis in the Baltics, Ukraine, and elsewhere. On September 9, the agency published orders from Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov, laying out plans for the ongoing review and cancellation of the “rehabilitation and acquittals” of alleged war criminals.

So Russia is restoring convictions for Nazi collaborators — so what?

The Prosecutor General is playing fast and loose with “rehabilitation.” As Memorial senior lawyer Grigory Vaypan explained to Mediazona, Article 4 of the 1991 Law “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression” doesn’t actually apply to convicted war criminals, including individuals who collaborated the Nazis. Yes, in 1955, the USSR’s Supreme Soviet amnestied citizens who, “out of cowardice or lack of awareness, were drawn into cooperation with the occupiers,” but amnesty merely releases convicts from punishment — it doesn’t annul verdicts or grant rehabilitation.

Vaypan told Mediazona that the authorities are likely conflating rehabilitation and amnesty for propaganda purposes and to make it easier to go after “borderline cases” (for example, when villagers were forced to become Nazi informants). Vaypan said the Prosecutor General’s campaign aims to incite support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by posthumously villifying “collaborators” and “Banderites” — WWII-themed invectives the Kremlin has hurled for years at Ukraine’s modern-day state.

Not so long ago, Russian officials were actually busy rehabilitating Soviet repression victims

Mediazona also spoke to Igor Volchkov, an attorney who worked from 2002 to 2005 in the Prosecutor General’s Rehabilitation Department for Victims of Political Repression. He said most of the department’s work involved overturning Soviet-era convictions for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda (prosecuted under the USSR’s infamous Article 58), though he says the agency was even then reluctant to rehabilitate anyone involved with armed resistance against the Soviet authorities. Volchkov said Vladimir Putin reportedly intervened in 2005 to dissolve the department, complaining that its very name defamed Russia’s security services.

The broader repercussions of Russia’s rehabilitation U-turn

Sociologist and memory politics researcher Daria Khlevnyuk told Mediazona that the Prosecutor General’s campaign against WWII “traitors” threatens researchers who study these individuals and especially activists who work to remind the public about the Soviet Union’s political repressions. Anyone working to “perpetuate the memory” of someone whose amnesty is suddenly overturned could face charges of “justifying Nazism” or “falsifying history,” warned Khlevnyuk. 

She also pointed out that the revisions to the government’s memorializing “concept” rob memory activists of an important tool for pressuring local officials to approve historical monuments, museum exhibits, and school events designed to draw attention to the USSR’s repressions against its own citizens. Khlevnyuk said the state’s messaging on rehabilitation has reversed since the 1990s (when the “new political elites” sought to distance themselves from Communism). Today, the “democratic values” subtext of any discussion about memorializing Soviet terror victims makes the subject problematic for a regime that sees itself at war again with the West. 

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Meduza’s feature reporting

• 🇮🇷 Russia now has Iranian missiles. Here’s what that could mean for Ukraine.

The news in brief

• 📣🏌️ Russia’s Education Ministry has proposed removing golf and cheerleading from schools, calling them “foreign practices” out of step with the nation’s “historical experience and traditions and moral and ethical standards”
• 🏭 Putin announced plans to increase Russia’s UAV production tenfold by the end of the year (last year, the country reportedly manufactured 140,000 drones of various kinds)
• 🇵🇱 Team Navalny’s Sirena news channel reported on Thursday that Polish Organized Crime Police arrested Anatoly Blinov on undisclosed charges (he’s the attorney Leonid Nevzlin allegedly tasked with organizing violent attacks on Anti-Corruption Foundation figures)
• ⚖️ Prosecutors in the appellate case of Antonina Fedorova (the ex-wife of Novaya Gazeta Europe editor-in-chief Kirill Martynov) have asked the judge to release her, converting a nine-year prison sentence to eight years of probation (she hid from police for 16 years and raised her daughter in secret after being convicted of pushing her down the stairs)
• 👮 Federal investigators have reportedly charged Novaya Gazeta Europe editor-in-chief Kirill Martynov with managing an undesirable organization — a felony offense in Russia (there’s still no official announcement)
• ⚖️ Tver court bans three (tiny, defunct) Vkontakte communities for promoting “childfree” lifestyle at the request of state prosecutors who said the memes “harm public morality” and “contradict goals and objectives of current laws” (though Russia hasn’t technically outlawed childfree content)
• 👮 Following Wednesday’s deadly shootout at Wildberries’s Moscow headquarters, police arrested Vladislav Bakalchuk on charges of murder, attempted murder, the attempted murder of a police officer, and vigilantism (officials have reportedly named more than two dozen suspects in the case)
• 🕯️ Wildberries corporate says it’s in contact with the families of the security guards killed in Wednesday’s shootout with Vladislav Bakalchuk’s entourage and will provide “all necessary support,” including paying for their funerals
• 🛻 Chechnya Governor Ramzan Kadyrov claims that Tesla remotely disabled the Cybertruck he acquired last month (Kadyrov said it was a gift from Elon Musk, which Musk vehemently denies)
• 💰 Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service says it’s identified a financial connection between the organizers of the attempted assassination of writer Zakhar Prilepin and the successful assassination of “war correspondent” blogger Vladlen Tatarsky (the same “contractor” paid the suspect in Prilepin’s attack and covered costs for Daria Trepova, who delivered the bomb that killed Tatarsky)
• 🤖 Journalists at Agentstvo Media report that the Kremlin’s alleged “Doppelgänger” propaganda network has started promoting an A.I.-generated country music song lampooning the U.S. presidential race and calling on Americans to “rise up” against their corrupt leaders
• 💥 Kaluga regional officials have banned media outlets and social media users from posting photos or videos of Ukrainian drones or the damage inflicted by their attacks (punishable by fines as high as 100,000 rubles — about $1,000)

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