Crimes of the Soviet regime: Legal assessment and punishment of the guilty ones
Crimes of the Soviet regime: Legal assessment and punishment of the guilty ones

Author(s): Nikita Vasilyevich Petrov
Subject(s): Criminal Law, International Law, Criminology, History of Communism
Published by: Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů
Summary/Abstract: Political changes that took place in the USSR in August 1991, when the power of the CPSU collapsed, opened access to archives that had been completely secret before. They also made it possible to collect and analyze evidence of the criminal nature of the soviet system. In the first place, these are documents about the “Great Terror” of 1937–1938 and documents that show how Stalin and the top Politburo figures organized mass killings of hundreds of thousands of people. These documents and statistics of repression had been kept secret from the public even during “perestroika” (1987–1991). Stalin’s crimes seemed to be exposed in those years, and a special commission of Politburo studied the history of repression. To date, efforts of Society Memorial and International Foundation “Democracy” have resulted in the publication of many documents about the soviet terror and mass violation of human rights. For example, the “Democracy” Foundation established by Alexander Yakovlev published more than 50 volumes of documentary collections. Society Memorial released a CD “Stalin’s Shooting Lists”. It includes materials about how Stalin and his closest aides issued death sentences as they took up the role of the judiciary bodies. Another CD released by Memorial contains a database about repressions in the USSR. It includes more than 2.6 million names of the repressed. Th us, we now have the documentary basis for making a legal assessment of the soviet crimes. Important documents are published, such as regulations about repressions, implementation reports, and the total statistics of repressions.

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