The 20th congress of the ruling CPSU, held in February 1956, declared a course towards the de-Stalinization of Soviet society, but could not bring the process to an end. Rehabilitation was carried out on an individual basis according to the statements of the victims of repression themselves or their relatives, if the first died in Stalin's dungeons and camps.

The leadership of the country following it let the issue go on the brakes and even tried to veil it. Everyone pretended that there was nothing like this in the country.

Perestroika of the mid-80s gave impetus to new attempts by society and democratic forces to resume the process of rehabilitation of victims of political repression. And if in the second half of the 50s it was only about individual decisions on the rehabilitation of the victims of Stalinism, then in the late 80s it was about the rehabilitation of all those who innocently fell into the millstones of state terror.

The first glimpse appeared on January 16, 1989 with a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR “On Additional Measures to Restore Justice Against Victims of Repression in the Period of the 30s and 40s and the Beginning of the 50s”.

On November 14, 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopted the Declaration "On the recognition of illegal and criminal repressive acts against peoples subjected to forced resettlement, and ensuring their rights."

On August 13, 1990, President of the Soviet Union M. Gorbachev issued a Decree “On the Restoration of the Rights of All Victims of Political Repressions of the 20-50s”.

But Stalinism subjected to repression not only on ethnic grounds. State terror was subjected to social, estate, corporate and individual characteristics. The Law of the Russian Federation N 1761-1 “On the rehabilitation of victims of political repressions”, adopted on October 18, 1991, was devoted to the rehabilitation of these categories of Soviet citizens, which was subsequently amended.

“During the years of Soviet power, millions of people became victims of the arbitrariness of a totalitarian state, were subjected to repression for political and religious beliefs, on social, national and other grounds. Condemning the long-standing terror and mass persecution of its people as incompatible with the idea of \u200b\u200blaw and justice, the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation expresses deep sympathy for the victims of unjustified repressions, their families and friends, declares a steady desire to seek real guarantees of the rule of law and human rights, ”the preamble said The law. The purpose of the Law was declared to be “rehabilitation of all victims of political repressions subjected to such in the territory of the Russian Federation from October 25 (November 7), 1917, their restoration in civil rights, elimination of other consequences of arbitrariness and providing currently feasible compensation for material damage”.

Perhaps this is a coincidence, but the next day, November 15, by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the RSFSR, the State Committee on National Affairs (Goskomnats of the RSFSR) was formed, although it subsequently underwent repeated transformations and liquidations.

On October 18, 1991, by the Decree of the Supreme Council of the RSFSR “On the Establishment of the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions”, October 30 was officially established as the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Political Repressions. The choice of date was connected with the memory of the hunger strike, which was started on October 30, 1974 by political prisoners of the Mordovian and Perm camps in protest against political repression in the USSR.

In the same 1991, it was decided to create corresponding units within the information centers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the republics, the Internal Affairs Directorate of the territories and regions, and in the Main Information Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia - the Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression and Archival Information. As the head of the Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, K. Nikishin, reported, over the past five years, the country has received 2 million 600 thousand applications and requests for rehabilitation and recognition as victims. (See Legal Journal, No. 23, November 1996)

On December 16, 1991 and March 30, 1992, the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation approved, respectively, the Commission for the Restoration of the Rights of Rehabilitated Victims of Political Repressions and its Regulation.

Subsequently, in the continuation and expansion of the first documents on the problem, a number of normative acts of the Parliament and the Government of Russia were adopted, providing for monetary compensation for lost housing and property or its return (Federal Laws: No. 5698-1 of September 3, 1993 and No. 166-FZ November 4, 1995)

On March 3, 1994, the Russian Government adopted Decree No. 419, which approved the Regulation on the procedure for providing benefits to rehabilitated persons and persons recognized as victims of political repression. Starting from 1994, the Ministry of Finance of Russia was instructed to provide in the federal budget “the necessary funds to ensure the provision of benefits to these categories of citizens.

On March 16, 1992, the Russian government adopted a regulation on the procedure for paying monetary compensation to persons rehabilitated in accordance with the Law of the Russian Federation N 1761-1 “On the rehabilitation of victims of political repression,” which was amended on July 18, 1994.

On August 2, 1994, the Cabinet of Ministers of Russia adopted Decree No. 899 “On approval of the Regulation on the conditions and procedure for the payment of compensation to persons subjected to Nazi persecution”. It was a question of compensation from the funds allocated by the Federal Republic of Germany for this category of Russian citizens.

On August 12, 1994, the same Cabinet of Ministers adopted Decree No. 926, which approved the provision on the procedure for returning to citizens illegally confiscated, seized or otherwise seized from property in connection with political repression of property, reimbursement of its value or payment of monetary compensation.

Considering that they were subjected to repression, including for religious reasons, President B. Yeltsin issued Decree No. 378 of March 14, 1996, which condemned the “long-term terror unleashed by the Bolshevik party-Soviet regime against clergy and believers of all faiths,” instructed The Prosecutor General’s Office, the FSB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia to rehabilitate them, the executive authorities of all levels "to assist believers in the restoration of religious buildings, the return of property taken from churches, mosques, synagogues, and other religious institutions."

On April 23, 1996, President of Russia B. Yeltsin adopted Decree No. 602 “On Additional Measures for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repressions,” which allows recognition as repressed even in the absence of documents, based on a court decision.

Rehabilitation was declared and repressed in connection with participation in the events in the city of Novocherkassk in June

By Presidential Decree No. 1509 of December 2, 1992, the Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression was formed. In 2004, the new President of Russia V. Putin issued Decree No. 1113 of August 25

2004, which approved the Regulation on the Commission under the President of the Russian Federation for the rehabilitation of victims of political repression.

Along with those who really suffered from the Stalinist repressions, other categories of Russian citizens tried to bring under this process. There were attempts to rehabilitate, for example, the leader of the White Movement A. Kolchak, the last Russian emperor Nicholas II and even the organizer of the mass repressions themselves, L. Beria and others. The Don Cossacks advocated the rehabilitation of the chieftain of the Cossack troops, General P. Krasnov, who during the Great Patriotic War actively collaborated with the Nazi forces and was executed by the Soviet court. Of these, only Nicholas II from the second call in 2008 was rehabilitated with his family. On March 28, 2009, Beria’s rehabilitation was denied.

If in the whole country the rehabilitation process was selective, then for the titular people of the Republic of Ingushetia, the problem of rehabilitation concerned almost everyone who was born before 1957.

As you know, on April 26, 1991 a fateful one was adopted for many ethnic groups that were subjected to repression on a national basis - the Law of the Russian Federation "On the rehabilitation of repressed peoples."

By the Decree of the Government of the Republic of Ingushetia

No. 97 dated June 10, 1994 “On the Commission for the Restoration of the Rights of Rehabilitated Victims of Political Repressions” with a view to implementing the Law of the Russian Federation dated October 18, 1991 “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repressions”, the Law of the Russian Federation dated April 26, 1991 “On of rehabilitation of repressed peoples ”under the Government of the Republic of Ingushetia, a commission was established to restore the rights of rehabilitated victims of political repression, headed by the head of the Government M.I. Didigov.

By Decree No. 2 of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ingushetia of January 4, 1995, “On Additional Measures to Implement Decisions of the Government of the Russian Federation on Restoring the Rights of Victims of Political Repressions,” the Ministry of Finance was obligated to “take measures to provide budgetary expenses for damages and providing benefits to repressed citizens.” The government commission and the working group began to work.

On February 20, 1995, Government Decision No. 26 adopted a regulation on the procedure for restoring the rights of repressed citizens of the Republic of Ingushetia and stateless persons residing in the Republic of Ingushetia.

On December 31, 1997, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ingushetia adopted the next Decree No. 337 “On Further Measures for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression in the Republic of Ingushetia”, which approved the Regulations “On the Procedure for Returning to Citizens Residing and Living in the Republic of Ingushetia Illegally Confiscated, Seized or Exited in another way from ownership in connection with political repressions of property, reimbursement of its value or payment of monetary compensation ”, on the Republican Commission for the Restoration of the Rights of Repressed Citizens en living in the Republic of Ingushetia and the composition of the commission itself, headed by the Minister of Justice Kh.I. Yandiev.

On July 31, 1999, a new regulatory act of the Government of the Republic of Ingushetia No. 211 “On streamlining the regulatory acts of the Government of the Republic of Ingushetia on the rehabilitation of victims of political repression” was issued.

Unlike previous regulations, the latter provided for rehabilitation, compensation and the restoration of the rights of repressed citizens of North Ossetia of Ingush ethnicity. The order of compensation for damage caused in connection with the use of repression in 1944 was established. First of all, they went directly subjected to repression and who were the owners of the confiscated property or housing. Next came the heirs of the first stage, then spouses and children, then grandchildren.

By order of the President of Ingushetia No. 9-rp dated January 20, 1998 and No. 14-rp dated February 18, 2000, Republican commissions for the rehabilitation of victims of political repressions were approved.

At first, the repressed received about 8 thousand rubles, then the amount was close to 10 thousand rubles for one apartment building for everyone who lived in it. The amount, of course, was scanty, but people and were glad to receive it.

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This article is devoted to the issue of rehabilitation processes of victims of political repressions, which are currently insufficiently studied and presented in Kazakhstan historiography. The party control commission in these years was very slow and inconsistent. The work took a lot of time, documents for each repressed were sent to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and only after its consideration, rehabilitation could occur. It was also affected by the fact that the officials involved in the rehabilitation remained people born of the administrative system and were endowed with all the features of the era that formed them, many of them had recently scribbled denunciations and with all “hook or crook” fought “enemies of the people”.

One of the most difficult legacies of the past was mass repression, arbitrariness and lawlessness during the period of totalitarianism, committed by Stalin and his leadership. Hundreds of thousands of people were subjected to unlawful accusations, violence, torture and physical destruction.

Repressions begun in the mid-20s of the 20th century,  during collectivization, they continued with brutal succession for several decades while Stalin was in power. They became a monstrous crime against their own people.

In the period from the 20s to the 50s. 3,777,380 people were convicted, of which 642,980 were sentenced to capital punishment. In Kazakhstan, during this period, the number of repressed persons amounted to 103 thousand people, every fourth of whom was shot. More than a million people were deported or forced to leave the republic.

A new round of repression and large-scale "purge", in the center of which was the "conspiracy of doctors", was prevented by the death of Stalin (March 5, 1953).

In Kazakhstan, the Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography, the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR, the Institute of Language and Literature, the Writers' Union of Kazakhstan, etc., were closely monitored.

It is terrible to imagine how further events would develop for the Kazakh intelligentsia, if Stalin remained to live ...

This article is devoted to the beginning of the rehabilitation processes of victims of political repressions, which are currently not well understood and are presented in Kazakhstani historiography.

From the first days after the death of Stalin, the new leadership of the country took steps against the abuses of past years. Stalin’s personal secretariat was dissolved, all kinds of reprisals were abolished: “troika”, “deuce”, “special meetings” and “special tribunals” through which mass repressions were carried out. The state security organs also underwent a serious reorganization: the MGB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs merged into a single Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, the gulags were transferred to the system of the Ministry of Justice.

The press officially announced the termination of the "personality cult policy". Unreasonable and aggressive attacks on cultural figures in the media lost their relevance and gradually came to naught.

Already on April 4, 1953, a message appeared about the rehabilitation of the “poisoning doctors” and the recognition of the use of “unacceptable methods of investigation” for the accused. The Supreme Court of the USSR revised the so-called “Leningrad case” and did not find the corpus delicti in it.

The party control committee under the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Central Committee of the Communist Parties of the Union Republics, on behalf of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, began to consider cases for the rehabilitation of communists involved in the 30s and 40s and in the early 50s. to party and judicial responsibility for political reasons.

Between July 1953 and February 1956 The Party Control Committee rehabilitated 5,456 communists expelled from the party on unfounded political charges.

It should be noted that the number of rehabilitated remained very small until September 1955, until an amnesty was announced for those convicted of cooperation with the Germans during the Great Patriotic War. So, from the two regions of Almaty and Dzhambul, which were taken for counting, in 1953 only one person was rehabilitated. In 1955, 17 people were rehabilitated in the Almaty region, and 5 people in the Dzhambul region.

The work of the party control commission during these years was very slow and inconsistent. The procedure itself took a lot of time, documents for each repressed were sent to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and only after its consideration, rehabilitation could occur. It was also affected by the fact that the officials involved in the rehabilitation remained people born of the administrative system and were endowed with all the features of the era that formed them, many of them had recently scribbled denunciations and with all “hook or crook” fought “enemies of the people”.

On the one hand, they seemed to have rehabilitated people, and on the other, they did it, as if reluctantly and leisurely, many cases were reviewed several times, postponed to a later time, especially if it concerned the intelligentsia.

And although, in 1954, many prominent figures of Kazakhstan returned to Kazakhstan: K.I. Satpayev, M.A. Auezov, H. Bekkhokhin, E. Bekmakhanov and others, the attitude of the authorities towards them continued to be very “wary,” moreover, before starting work, in addition to rehabilitation and appeal, they “had to repent of their mistakes and, as it were, the future, promise to be obedient and accommodating. "

The further activities of many representatives of the Kazakh intelligentsia were repeatedly discussed in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan. So, for example, at the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan dated May 25, 1954, the issue of the appeal of the writer H. Bekkhokhin was examined in detail, which stated that “given the recognition of the mistake made and the positive feedback on the work in recent years, it can be restored again in the ranks of the CPSU “but for an ideological mistake, declare a reprimand against H. Bekkhozhin with entering into the registration card.”

The writer S. Mukanov found himself in a similar situation. The bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan did not satisfy the writer’s request for the restoration of the party experience, but issued the following decision: “To explain to Comrade S. Mukanov that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan cannot satisfy his request to exclude the break in the party Comrade Mukanov has been out of the party for 4 years. ” .

The bureau also rejected the request of the writer I. Esenberlin to restore him to the ranks of the CPSU, confirming the "correctness" of the decision of the Alma-Ata regional party committee of July 28, 1951 regarding his exclusion from the ranks of the CPSU. . And there are quite a lot of such examples of “repenting of past ideological mistakes”, even K.I. Satpayev did not avoid such humiliating procedures on the part of the authorities.

As before, censorship tightly controlled the works of Kazakhstani writers. For example, in 1953-1954. a special list of works to be excluded from the consolidated lists of banned literature was approved. This list has been compiled and modified several times. As a result, the best works of Kazakh literature were removed from the book trade and libraries, "as containing ideological and political errors." These are the works of the following authors: M. Auezov - “Akyn Aga”, 1950, circulation of 20,000 copies; K. Shangytbaev - “Honor”, \u200b\u200b1945, circulation of 10,000 copies; U. Turmanzhanov - “Collection of Kazakh proverbs and sayings”, 1935, circulation of 5,150 copies; “Native Land”, 1944, circulation of 5,000 copies. The album “Kazakhstan” was also subject to seizure, the circulation of which amounted to 10,000 copies, as pictures of "enemies of the people" were printed in it.

A similar account was shared by many other works of Kazakh writers.

After the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU (February 1956), the process of rehabilitation of victims on political charges of the 30s-40s - early 50s began to take place more intensively, was greatly simplified. In order to expedite the procedure, special commissions for reviewing cases were sent to the camps, which were temporarily vested with the rights of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and could carry out rehabilitation, pardon, reduction of prison terms, etc. The bulk of the rehabilitated accounted for the period from 1956 to 1961. Over the years, more than 700 thousand people have been rehabilitated throughout the country.

But, unfortunately, starting in 1962, the rehabilitation of "victims of arbitrariness" gradually began to be curtailed and completely stopped by 1964.

In Kazakhstan, in two regions - Almaty and Dzhambul (which were taken for counting), the number of rehabilitated amounted to: “In 1956 - 155, in 1957 - 537, in 1958 - 372, in 1959 - 163, in 1960 - 179, in 1961 - 71, in 1962 - 69, in 1963 - 51, in 1964 - 64 people. ”

The rehabilitation work had many shortcomings.  Firstly, it went unevenly, selectively and became one of the most controversial phenomena of the period under consideration. The massive return from the camps was a natural catalyst for public sentiment, causing deep social stress. The authorities did not answer the most burning questions: “How many people were innocently injured, how many died, and most importantly, why were they sent to prison dungeons”? The silence of the authorities gave rise to a very different attitude towards the rehabilitated.

The return of former prisoners to normal life was extremely difficult. For many of them, certain activities were “closed”. So, the historian E. Bekmakhanov, returning from prison in 1954, was able to start teaching only after a year. Another Kazakhstani scientist-historian Bek Suleimenova has the same situation.

Many of the rehabilitated were so psychologically broken that they could no longer engage in any activity. For example, the former first secretary of one of the republican regional party committees N. Kuznetsov, after his release, got a job as a simple forester. A famous communist M.L. Fishman, who was part of the German partisan detachment during the Civil War, was forced to live at the German cemetery in Moscow for 7 months after returning from the camp. Nobody wanted to help her.

The selective nature of rehabilitation has generated a huge resonance in society. Priority was given to the repressions of 1937-1938, the beginning of the 50s against party leaders, and the repressions of the 20s, "fake processes" fabricated in the period 30-40s against the "opposition", such as the "anti-Soviet right-wing Trotskyist bloc," The “Bukharin group”, “workers' opposition”, etc. were not even submitted for consideration.

In Kazakhstan, the state activity of Alash-Horde continued to be a forbidden topic (although amnesty was announced to the participants in the Alash movement in the first years of Soviet power), the period of collectivization of the 20-30s, the famine that claimed almost 49% of the population of Kazakhstan and others forbidden cases.

At the meeting on ideological issues, it was once again emphasized that “... the works of Alash leaders are not subject to re-publication. The party must continue to work to eliminate the harmful consequences of the personality cult on the ideological front, but this does not mean to whitewash everyone and everything. ”

Many historians are inclined to think that N.S. Khrushchev omitted these years on purpose, because “In the mid-30s, he headed the metropolitan party organization, was a member of the Central Committee, i.e. during the period of the great "purges" he was at their center. " Subsequently, he said in his memoirs: “In the question of the open processes of the 30-40s, we were dual. We were afraid to finish to the end, although there was no doubt that these people were not to blame, that they were victims of arbitrariness. The open processes were attended by the leaders of the fraternal communist parties, so we postponed the rehabilitation of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Rykov and other comrades for an indefinite period, you can compose a whole book of only the names of the largest, military, party, Soviet, Komsomol and business leaders, diplomats and scientists. All these were honest people. They became victims of arbitrariness without any reason ”

In fact, the number of victims of repression is so great that this will not require a single book, but a large multi-volume publication.

The attitude of the authorities towards former prisoners was ambiguous, many of them were checked several times, were not allowed to engage in public and party work. At one of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, the following was said: “Having studied the decisions of the Bureau of the Alma-Ata regional party committee, as well as the appeals, amnesty and rehabilitated cases, we came to the conclusion that the Bureau of the regional party committee, in some cases, is not serious and wrong in restoring former prisoners to the party, showing excessive condescension and liberalism in this matter. Meanwhile, among them there are people who are viciously opposed to the Soviet regime, especially from among the former Trotskyists and Alashordyns. Such an indiscriminate approach to the restoration of party ranks may lead to clogging of party organization with unnecessary party people. ”

Noteworthy is the document concerning the activities of T. yskulov, according to which the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan (November 1960) expressed the opinion that the rehabilitation of T. Ryskulov is not a basis for revising his activities as anti-party, national and pan-Turkic.

Secondly,  even for those who were rehabilitated in the 1950s and 1960s, the mechanism of lawlessness was not fully exposed, and the rehabilitation of “victims of arbitrariness” remained incomplete for very many years. The data on the rehabilitated were carefully hidden. So, the writer K. Ikramov subsequently recalled how he received a document on the posthumous rehabilitation of his father, along with a secret instruction "not to spread this with anyone."

Thirdly,  rehabilitation of executed or deceased prisoners in the camps was carried out only at the request of close relatives, if there were none, then the case was not considered. Inquiries of relatives about the fates of their loved ones very often received incorrect information (such as that their relatives died a natural death, even indicating the diagnosis of the disease, in fact, many of them were shot). Only in modern conditions, those rehabilitated in the 1950s and 1960s acquired the right for descendants to learn the truth about the drama of their life and death.

Fourth, the impossibility of determining the exact extent of the charges of intentional fraud, as many of the politically motivated accusations were specially hidden, and the party, economic, military, and other leaders were sent to prison cells for other purposes. A huge number of documents were destroyed on the basis of "approved selection lists." Most cases of prisoners after rehabilitation were burned. In folders with the inscription "keep forever," instead of protocols and denunciations, there was a short certificate of rehabilitation, or a license plate of the case. As a result, society still does not know the exact extent of the terror, nor the exact extent of the rehabilitation of the late 50-60s.

The most terrible injustice was that no one condemned and prosecuted the NKVD investigators who tortured the convicts, prison leaders, prison guards and scammers. These people, who have corrupted hundreds of thousands of lives, have gone unpunished.

But, despite these shortcomings, the rehabilitation process of the “victims of the Stalinist regime” was of great progressive importance. Hundreds of sons and daughters of the Kazakh people returned from prison to their homes home.

The works of repressed writers became available to Kazakhstanis: S. Seifullin, I. Dzhansugurov, B. Maylin and others. The good names of prominent party and government figures of the Kazakh SSR were restored: S. Asfendiyarov, U. Dzhandosov, U. Isaev, L.I. Mirzoyan, S. Mendyshev, M. Masanchi, A. Rozybakiev and others. True, one cannot fail to say about such a sad fact that almost all of them were rehabilitated posthumously.

The rehabilitation processes of victims of political repressions were not brought to an end, democratic and progressive undertakings were hindered by the totalitarian system itself, which in principle remained untouched, with its administrative-command methods.

Once again, work on the rehabilitation of victims of political processes was resumed by the Party Control Committee under the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Central Committee of the Communist Parties of the Union Republics in September 1987.

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12.   Medvedev Zh., Medvedev R. Unknown Stalin - M: Folio, 2002.
13. Kozybaev M.K., Abylkhozhin Zh.B., Aldazhumanov K.S. Collectivization in Kazakhstan. - Almaty: Science, 1992.
14. Archive of the President of the RK.F. 708. Op. 35.D. 1293.L. 258.
15. Aksyutin Yu. N.S. Khrushchev: "We must tell the truth about the cult of personality." - Labor. - 1988. - November 13.
16. Khrushchev N.S. Memories. - M .: Vagrius, 1997.
17. Archive of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan. - F.708. - Op. 30. - D. 455. - L. 11, 16.
18. Archive of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan.- Ф.708.- Op. 33.- D. \u200b\u200b171.- L. 237238.

  Between sympathy and indifference - rehabilitation of victims of Soviet repression

Article by Arseny Roginsky and Elena Zhemkova

Introduction

The repressive activities of the Soviet regime were politically motivated, multidirectional, mass and undulating.

Political repressions began already under Lenin and continued in the post-Stalin era, the last political prisoners were released in 1991 under Gorbachev.

The tribal feature of the Soviet regime, which arose from the very beginning of Bolshevik rule and did not disappear with the death of Stalin, is state violence as a universal tool for solving any political and social problems. Idea stateviolence has always been an indispensable component of Soviet communistideology. In the first decades of the Soviet era (until 1953), state violence was realized in the form of permanent and massive political terror. Hundreds of thousands of people were subjected to repression every year. It was terror that was the backbone factor of the era. It provided the possibility of centralizing control, and breaking horizontal ties (to prevent possible resistance), and high vertical mobility, and the rigidity of planting ideology with the ease of its modification, and a large army subjects of slavishlabor and much more. After Stalin's death, terror became selective, the number of those arrested for political reasons was several thousand or even several hundred people a year. Arrests ceased only in 1987, when the Soviet Union had less than five years to live.

After Stalin, until the mid-1960s, new political repressions accompanied the process of rehabilitation of the victims of terror of the 1930s and 1940s. Then the rehabilitation process actually stopped and resumed with new energy and in a new ideological framework only in 1988.

1. Fantastic scale of terror. Many millions of people became its victims (see below for more details)
2. The unprecedented duration of terror. Its direct and indirect victims, as well as witnesses of terror, were four or even five generations of Soviet (Russian) citizens.
3. The centrality of terror. Terror was carried out by security agencies ( Cheka -OGPU-NKVD-MGB-KGB), but all the main terrorist campaigns (including the ideological campaigns of late times, when arrests were replaced by prohibitions on the profession) were initiated by the highest party body - the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) -KPSS and passed under himconstant monitoring.
4. Categoricality of terror. Most of the victims of the era of mass terror (including those who were individually charged) were subjected to repression for belonging to a particular social, confessional, ethnic group. In softened forms, this also happened in later stages - stateanti-Semitism, persecution of believers, dispersal of amateur song clubs, suspicions of any horizontal connections.
5. The flagrantly extra-legal (anti-legal) nature of mass terror:
   • false, fictitious allegations;
   • ill-treatment of detainees, including sophisticated physical torture, which was used to obtain recognition of alleged crimes;
   • the sentencing of the vast majority of those arrested not by the courts, but by (anti-constitutional) extra-judicial bodies, often specially created for conducting separate terrorist campaigns (“troika”, “Commission” NKVDand the Prosecutor of the USSR ”, etc.),
   • extrajudicial sentencing
   • “Simplified procedure” for the consideration of cases by judicial authorities - without calling witnesses, without the participation of lawyers, in case of conviction - lack of the right to petition for clemency, etc.
   • total violation of all rights of prisoners in camps and labor settlements, even those that were recorded in soviet law
6. Advocacy stateterror its needand moral justification. For many decades, the idea of \u200b\u200benemies — external and internal, of a heroic struggle against these enemies waged by the party and security organs, of duty every Sovietperson to take part in this fight, etc. All the failures of the authorities and, above all, the low standard of living of the population were attributed to the activities of enemies. The effects of terror and the propaganda that accompanied it are felt today.

Over 70 years of Soviet rule, representatives of all socio-political strata and population groups have become victims of political repression. Repressions were subjected not only to those who were in open political opposition to the authorities, but also to those whose danger was only potential - the so-called “class-alien” and “socially dangerous elements”, including children and other members of the families of “enemies of the people” ". Among the victims of political repression is the color of the nation, its most active, competent and talented representatives.

Immediately after the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the persecution of representatives of all opposition political parties and organizations, from monarchist to socialist, began. In subsequent years, all non-political independent public organizations were routed, simply closed or stateized. This was an important step in ensuring the uncontrolled power of the Bolsheviks.

During the years of the Civil War (1917-1922 / 23), according to some estimates, based on incomplete information, various types of repressions (including massacres of hostages) affected more than 2 million people, primarily representatives of the former ruling classes and the country's intellectual elite. A wave of mass repression swept the Russian peasantry, who opposed the policy of the Bolsheviks in the countryside. Regular troops were thrown to suppress the resistance of the peasants. The Cossacks underwent terror. As a result of the “gossip” policy, tens of thousands of people were physically destroyed, many emigrated.

Mass repressions accompanied the collectivization of agriculture in the mid-1920s and early 1930s. According to minimal estimates, about 1 million peasant farms were "dispossessed" and 6 million peasants and their families were repressed.

Since the mid-30s, the practice of conducting public / open political processes has become widespread - “The Union of Marxist-Leninists”, “Moscow Counter-Revolutionary Organization-“ Worker Opposition Group ”,“ Leningrad Counter-Revolutionary Zinovievsky Group of Safonov, Zalutsky and Others ”,“ Moscow Center "," Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center "," Anti-Soviet Right-Trotskyist Bloc "," Anti-Party Counter-Revolutionary Group of Right-wing Slepkov and Others ("Bukharin School") "," Leningrad Case ". In total, the punitive bodies in the country counted more than 70 “blocs”, “centers”, “unions”, “schools” and “groups”, whose members were sentenced to capital punishment or long sentences.

The intelligentsia was persecuted for political reasons during the years of Soviet power. Hundreds of thousands of cases were fabricated on charges of representatives of science, culture, engineering and technical personnel, employees of state institutions.

The army and navy were subjected to widespread political repression. Severe repression hit the sailors and soldiers of the Kronstadt garrison in the spring of 1921. The "purges" of the Red Army began immediately after the end of the civil war. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, a large number of so-called military experts were repressed in the framework of the specially developed operation "Spring". In the 30s and subsequent years, tens of thousands of military personnel were groundlessly accused of espionage, sabotage, wrecking. Repression led to the weakening of the Soviet armed forces, put the USSR in an extremely difficult position in World War II and became an indirect cause of the country's great military losses. Political repression in the army was continued both during the war and after its end.

Former Soviet soldiers captured and surrounded in battles to defend their homeland (1.8 million people repatriated to the USSR after the war) and civilians forcibly forced into forced labor in Nazi-occupied territories (about 3.5 million of them returned to the USSR after the end of the war). Many of these people, after being tested in the “filtration” camps, were unjustifiably convicted of state, military, and other crimes during the war and sent to “penal battalions,” to exile, deportation, and special settlement, and were subjected to other deprivations and restrictions on their rights.

The victims of total deportations were 11 peoples of the former USSR (Germans, Poles, Kalmyks, Karachais, Balkars, Ingush, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Koreans, Greeks, Finns), 48 peoples were partially evicted. These people during the Second World War and the first post-war years were expelled from places of traditional residence and, according to decisions of the highest party and state leadership of the country, were deported to remote, sparsely populated and unsuitable for living areas THE USSR .The total number of people repressed on ethnic grounds is approaching 3 million people.

Foreign citizens were subjected to political repression. Many workers of the Comintern, political emigrants - Germans, Poles, Austrians, Mongols, Americans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks and many others were repressed.

During the years of Soviet power, not only adults but also children became victims of political repression. Only because their parents turned out to be nobles, tsarist officers, “fists”, “Trotskyists”, “enemies of the people”, dissidents, children were expelled or deported together with their parents, in case of arrest of parents they were placed in special orphanages, subjected to other deprivations and restrictions of rights.

Representatives of all religious faiths were subjected to political repression. A strong blow was inflicted on the Russian Orthodox Church - more than 200 thousand Orthodox clergy became victims of repressive policies. Islam has been severely repressed. Since the end of the 30s, repressions against Judaists intensified - the majority of rabbis and other ministers of synagogues in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia suffered. The practice of repressive politics was the persecution of clergymen for religious beliefs, but at the same time the conviction took place in falsified cases for criminal offenses (bribes, abuse of official position, etc.).

In the 1950s and 1980s, participants in the dissident movement and dissenters were subjected to criminal prosecution, exile, placement in forced psychiatric hospitals in closed institutions, unjustified deprivation of civil rights, and expulsion from the USSR. Repression of dissidents and dissidents continued until 1991.

On the whole, data on “political crime” in the USSR show a strong dependence of political repressions on the political and ideological situation. Anti-Soviet motivation, as a rule, was established on the basis of political considerations and of “revolutionary expediency”. Only in isolated cases did the victim’s motivation reflect the real motives of the person who committed this or that act, regarded as “counter-revolutionary” or “anti-Soviet”. Some of the repressed citizens did not commit any "counter-revolutionary" or "anti-Soviet" actions, but only found any disagreement with the authorities. The bulk did not at all show a negative attitude towards the authorities and did not commit any punishable or suspicious acts - these people were repressed in a planned preventive manner.

The long-standing discussion about the scale of terror is based more often on intuitive ideas about the political terror of the Soviet era than on the primary sources. In this discussion, a variety of figures are called - from 2-3 million to 40-50 million victims.

Memorial carried out special work on counting victims. The calculations are based on figures extracted from official reports of punitive departments. An analysis of the documents examined confirms that, in general, the numbers presented in these reports can be trusted.

Based on the types of repression and the types of sources on which we rely, the calculations are divided into two parts:

• m the extent of the repression "individually"
• scale of administrative repression

Repression "on an individual basis" was almost always accompanied by compliance (even if only on paper) with investigative and (quasi) judicial procedures. A separate investigation file was opened for each arrested person. Statistical records in such cases were maintained by state security agencies systematically and in a uniform (albeit from time to time changing) form.

Administrative repression is repression without individual prosecution, which was used, in most cases, according to formal group characteristics (social, national, confessional, etc.). The usual punishment is deprivation of property and forcible resettlement "in remote areas" of the country, as a rule, in specially created "labor villages". Statistical reporting is in the materials of various government departments, it was conducted in connection with individual campaigns and is significantly less complete and accurate than reporting on “individual repression”. The personal affairs of the deportees were not started at the place of his permanent residence, but already after the person arrived at the place of serving the sentence;

Political repressions "individually"

The source for the study of repression on an “individual basis” is the reports of the bodies of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD-KGB. They have been preserved in the archive of the current FSB in full enough since 1921. We had the opportunity to study the reports for 1921-1953. To obtain data on the repression of 1918-1920. and 1954-1958 we use figures from the works of V.V. Luneeva, total data for 1959-1986 obtained from a comparison of several sources.

   Arrests by bodies of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD-MGB-KGB on an “individual basis”

	Arrested		Arrested		Arrested
				Total	6 975 197

Of course, these data are not completely complete - so, we are convinced that the number of victims is 1918-1920. was larger than indicated in the table. The same applies to the period 1937-1938., And also 1941. However, we can not imagine really more accurate documented figures.

In total, we see that in total, about 7 million people were arrested by the state security agencies for the entire period of their activity.

At the same time, statistical reporting data allows us to determine how many people were arrested each year on what charge. Studying the figures of those arrested from this point of view, we see that the security agencies arrested people not only for political charges, but also for charges of smuggling, speculation, embezzlement of socialist property, official crimes, murders, counterfeiting, etc. In order to really find out the presence or absence of a political motive in each individual case, it is necessary to study specific cases. It is practically impossible. We are forced to deal not with specific cases, but with numbers in reports.

Analysis of the reports allows us to conclude that there are at least 23-25% of the number of “non-political” cases in the general array. Thus, we should not talk about 7 million victims of Soviet political terror, but about 5.1-5.3 million.

However, this is also an inaccurate figure - because the reports do not reflect people with names, but “statistical units”. The same person could be arrested several times. So, participants in pre-revolutionary political parties, several times representatives of the clergy, were arrested 4-5 times in the first twenty years of Soviet power; many peasants who were first arrested in 1930-1933 were secondly arrested in 1937, many who were released after 10 years in prison in 1947 were soon arrested again, etc. Statistical reports do not give exact figures on this score, we assume that there were at least 300-400 thousand such people. Thus, the total number of people subjected to political repression on individual charges, apparently, is 4.7-5 million people.

Of these, according to our estimates, 1.0-1.1 million people were shot at the sentences of various extrajudicial and judicial authorities, the rest were sent to camps and colonies, a small part to exile.

Looking ahead, let's look at this figure from the point of view of the rehabilitation process of the 1950s - 2000s. Of course, not all of those repressed for political reasons were subject to rehabilitation - among them were real criminals (for example, Nazi criminals or Soviet punishers who collaborated with the Nazis), but there is no doubt that

(a) The vast majority of these approximately 5 million people were innocent victims of the regime;

b) each of the cases against these people should have been examined by the prosecutor’s office and the courts for rehabilitation, and a detailed substantiated answer should have been given for each of them - should this person be rehabilitated or not.

Political repression in the "administrative order"

Administrative repressions were carried out according to the decisions of various bodies: party, Soviet, state. Documents make it possible to identify the main repressive campaigns (flows) with an approximate (more or less accurate) number of victims of each of them. Unlike individual repressions, we can consider all victims of these repressions (deportations) as victims of political

motive - this motive is explicitly stated in almost all government decisions regarding each specific campaign.

The most massive deportations are deportations of peasants in the era

“Collectivization” (1930-1933), deportation of “socially dangerous” Poles and Polish citizens, as well as citizens of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova after the forcible incorporation of Eastern Poland, the Baltic States, Bessarabia into the USSR (1940-1941), preventive deportations Soviet Germans and Finns (1941-1942) after the beginning of the Soviet-German war, total deportations (1943-1944) of the “punished peoples” of the North Caucasus and Crimea (Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars and others).

In determining the number of deportees, Memorial relies on modern research, in which we participated.

   The number of persons subjected to administrative repression
   (mainly in the form of deportation)

Deportation campaign	Year	amount
Deportation of Cossacks from the Priterechye	1920	45 000
Clearing the western borders: Finns and Poles	1930	18 000
	1930	752 000
	1931	1 275 000
	1932	45 000
	1933	268 000
	1935	23 000
	1936	5 300
Cleaning up the western borders (Poles, Germans)	1935 - 1936	128 000
Sweeping the southern borders: Kurds	1937	4 000
Cleansing the eastern borders: total deportation of Koreans and others	1937	181 000
Stripping the southern borders: Jews and Iranians	1938	6 000
Sovietization and the cleansing of new western borders: former Polish and other foreign citizens	1940	276 000
borders: Western Ukraine, Western Belarus	1941	51 000
Sovetization and Stripping of the Northwest and Southwest Borders: Baltic	1941	45 000
Sovietization and mopping up of the northwest and southwest borders: Moldova	1941	30 000
	1941	927 000
Preventive deportations of Soviet Germans and Finns	1942	9 000
Deportation of Greeks, Romanians and others from the Crimea and the North Caucasus	1942	5 000
The deportation of Karachais	08.1943 - spring 1944	75 000

Deportation of Kalmyks	12.1943 - 06.1944	97 000
Deportation of Chechens and Ingush	1944	484 000
Deportation of the Balkars	1944	42 000
Deportation of OUN members and family members of OUN activists	1944-1947	115 000
Deportation of Crimean Tatars from Crimea to Uzbekistan	1944	182 000
Deportation of Crimean peoples (Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians and others) from Crimea to Uzbekistan	1944	42 000
“Punished denominations”: deportations of “true orthodox Christians ”(July 1944)	1944	1 000
Total deportations of Meskhetian Turks, as well as Kurds, Khemshins, Lazes and others from South Georgia (November 1944)	1944	93 000
Deportation of representatives of “punished peoples”	1945	10 000
Deportation of "interned-mobilized" from East Germany, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia	1944-1947	277 000
Deportation of “fists” from Lithuania to the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Irkutsk region and Buryat-Mongolia	1948	49 000
The deportation of the “parasite pointers”	1948	53 000
Deportation of resistance members and members of their families (“bandits and bandit assistants from the kulaks”) from Latvia	1949	42 000
Deportation of resistance members and their families (“Gangsters and gangsters from fists”) from Estonia	1949	20 000
Deportation of resistance members and members of their families (“bandits and bandit assistants from the kulaks”) from Lithuania	1949	32 000
Deportation of Greek nationals and former Greek nationals from the Black Sea coast of Russia and Ukraine, as well as from Georgia and Azerbaijan	1949	58 000
The deportation of "bandits and bandit assistants" from the kulaks "from Moldova	1949	36 000
Deportation of fists and gangsters and members their families from Pytalovsky, Pechora and Kachanovsky districts of the Pskov region to the Khabarovsk Territory	1950	1 400
Deportation of former Basmachi from Tajikistan	1950	3 000
Deportation of “Anders” and their family members from Lithuania	1951	4 500
Deportation of “Jehovah's” from Moldova - Operation "North"	1951	3 000
Deportation of "kulaks" from the Baltic states, Moldova, Western Ukraine and Western Belarus	1951	35 000
Deportation of "fists" from Western Belarus	1952	6 000
	Total	5 854 200

Due to the lack of accurate digital data, the above list does not indicate a number of victims of administrative reprisals: dispossessed without expulsion (i.e., deprived of houses and property and resettled inside their regions) during collectivization, former Soviet prisoners of war who were forcibly sent after “Filtering” into “working battalions” after the war, into a number of other, numerically less significant flows (expulsion of Cossack fists from the Semirechensk, Syr-Darinsk, Ferghana and Samarkand regions outside Turku region, in particular to the European part of Russia in 1921, the deportation of Germans, Ingrian Finns and other “socially dangerous” elements from the border regions of the Leningrad Region in 1942, the deportation of Crimean Tatars and Greeks from the Krasnodar and Stavropol Territories in 1948 g. and much more).

In total, according to various estimates, the victims of deportations were at least 6 (most likely 6.3-6.7) million people.

In total, about 11-11.5 million people were repressed for political reasons in the USSR. For so many people, the issue of rehabilitation would have to be addressed..

Legal rehabilitation of victims

Rehabilitation of victims of political repression began after the death of Stalin in March 1953 and actually has not ended until today. We distinguish three stages of rehabilitation.

The first stage of rehabilitation.

This first stage is in turn divided into two: 1953-1961 and 1962-1983. We look at them together.

The word “rehabilitation” entered the public vocabulary in the 1950s, when almost immediately after the death of Stalin (March 5, 1953), selective and then ever wider release of victims of political repression from prisons, camps and exiles began. Soon, their legal rehabilitation began - i.e. the process of reviewing investigative cases, culminating in the issuance of a “rehabilitation certificate” - an official document certifying the innocence of a person who has previously been repressed.

Rehabilitation has always been determined by the political tasks of the party leadership and has always taken place under the relentless control of the Politburo. Initially, rehabilitation covered only a narrow circle of relatives and close acquaintances of members of the Politburo. The first to return from exile was the wife of Stalin’s closest associate V. Molotov, Polina Zhemchuzhina (released immediately after Stalin’s death, legally rehabilitated in May 1953, and restored to the party by decision of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee on March 21, 1953). One of the first on May 7, 1953, also by the decision of the Presidium of the Central Committee, was rehabilitated the brother of another Stalin's associate L. Kaganovich - Mikhail Kaganovich. In the same year, a whole series of party and state figures were rehabilitated.

Extensive rehabilitation began in 1954. In May 1954, special commissions were established (central and regional) to consider cases against persons who were in custody at that time. These commissions were given the right to fully rehabilitate convicts, apply a pardon, retrain the charge, etc. For almost two years of work, these commissions examined cases for more than 337 thousand people.

A powerful impetus for rehabilitation was given by Khrushchev's report at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in February 1956, dedicated to the "personality cult" of Stalin. In March 1956, new commissions were created - this time under the auspices of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. For half a year they examined the cases of almost 177 thousand people, including 81 thousand people who were in the camps. Rehabilitation was particularly active in 1956-1960.

In parallel with the work of the commissions, the prosecutor's office and the courts were actively involved in the rehabilitation process. Prosecutors checked each case, requested certificates from parallel cases, certificates from archives (in particular, from the party archive, if it was a question of party members), in many cases called witnesses (including those who had once testified against repressed, it happened that the former investigators) and made a conclusion, on the basis of which the heads of the prosecutorial authorities filed a protest in the case with the judicial authority, which canceled the sentence (as a rule, in the absence of an event or corpus delicti) ix of rehabilitation.

For the former communists, “party rehabilitation,” ie restoration in the party - the bodies of the Party Control Committee under the Central Committee of the CPSU were engaged in this rehabilitation. It was carried out according to the statements of former communists who had previously received a certificate of legal rehabilitation. For the period 1956-1961. About 31 thousand people received party rehabilitation.

By the end of 1961, the energy of the rehabilitation process was exhausted. The political rehabilitation tasks that Khrushchev set for himself were largely fulfilled: a new course of power was demonstrated to the country and the world, decisively (according to Khrushchev) breaking with the Stalinist repressive policy. The symbolic conclusion of this stage was the removal of Stalin's body from the Mausoleum by decision of the 21st Congress of the CPSU of October 30, 1961.

The main feature of the first stage of rehabilitation is its half-heartedness, selectivity and subordination to the political interests of the post-Stalin leadership. She could not be otherwise.

The release of the innocent prisoners from the camps and the return of their good name and reputation to them, as well as to the dead, according to Khrushchev's plan, should have strengthened the authority of the CPSU in the eyes of the population. From the 1930s, Stalin was declared guilty of terror by instilling his own “cult of personality”, destroying inner-party democracy (the so-called “Leninist norms of party life”) and single-handedly governing the country, as well as the security organs “out of control of the party” ". According to Khrushchev, the era of repression was relatively small segments - the second half of the 30s. and - to a lesser extent - several post-war years.

This design made it possible to get the party as a whole out of criticism. Moreover, it was the party that was declared the main victim of terror - although this is completely inconsistent with reality.

In addition, the fight against the “cult of personality” allowed Khrushchev to strengthen his position in the Politburo, using the fact of the active participation in the terror of Molotov and Kaganovich to remove them from power. It was also an important justification for lowering the status of state security bodies (since 1954 - not independent

ministry, and a committee under the Council of Ministers) and strengthening party control over them. But the same design also predetermined the inferiority of the rehabilitation process.

Rehabilitation (restoration of reputation, restoration of all rights) concerned only those convicted on individual charges. But not all:

• Rehabilitation was limited chronologically to the period of the 30s (actually, from the middle of the decade) - the beginning of the 50s, since the purpose of rehabilitation was proclaimed “a return to Leninist norms” and it was obviously assumed that before the strengthening of the “personality cult” there were no political repressions .
• For the same reason, rehabilitation was categorically limited; significant categories of victims were excluded from it, which were still considered “enemies”: not only members of the “bourgeois” parties, but also socialists (social democrats, Socialist-Revolutionaries), most of the inner-party opposition, to a large extent the clergy, peasants who resisted collectivization, and many others.
• Rehabilitation in this first period was carried out exclusively “in a declarative manner”, i.e. according to the statements of the victims or their relatives. However, there were frequent cases when, according to the statement of one of the victims or one of the relatives, and if the case was not an individual but a group one, then all the victims of this group case were rehabilitated (“at the same time”).
• For deportees who were serving their sentences in special settlements (more than 2.5 million people in 1953), rehabilitation came down to their release - sometimes with the right to return to their previous places of residence, sometimes without this right. Decrees on their release never recognized the state’s guilt - for example, for “repressed peoples” repression was justified by “wartime conditions”. In fact, the “repressed peoples” were not rehabilitated, but pardoned. If the convicted person on individual charges at least partially compensated for the seized property, then for the deportees who lost their homes and all property, the question of compensation was not raised at all.

A striking example of the inferiority and half-heartedness of the rehabilitation process is the following fact.

Starting in 1939, after two years of mass executions, the relatives of those shot by extra-judicial (sometimes judicial) authorities were informed that their relatives were sentenced to 10 years in camps without the right to correspondence. 10 years later, in the late 40s, after the relatives did not return from the camps, new requests followed - and then it was decided to answer that the executed people died from illness in the camps. At the same time, the false date of death was reported (orally) to relatives. Almost 10 years later, in the mid-50s, a new wave of requests followed at the beginning of the rehabilitation process. In 1955, in response to it, a special instruction of the KGB was issued (of course, agreed upon by the Central Committee of the CPSU) that relatives could be issued an official death certificate of a prisoner in the camp with a false date and false cause of death - the same as earlier relatives were only informed orally.

From 1955 to 1962 253,598 such false references were issued. And only since 1963 was it allowed to issue certificates with genuine dates, but without an indication in the column

“Cause of death” of the word “execution” - a dash was put instead. Certificates indicating the true date and the true cause of death began to be issued only in 1989. The reason for the 1955 decision was the KGB opinion that the report of the execution "could be used to the detriment of the Soviet state."

This is very symbolic for the entire process of Khrushchev’s rehabilitation - deciding to tell the truth, at the same time constantly metering this truth, simultaneously telling a lie, and completely turn a blind eye to many aspects of repression.

Fear of jeopardizing the foundations of power, fear of the population having, as a result of rehabilitation, doubts about the infallibility of the party and the Soviet state, determined the whole nature and direction of rehabilitation. Hence the intentional narrowing of the rehabilitation - chronological and categorical. Hence the refusal to revise the most famous public processes in which hatred for the enemies of the Soviet Union has been brought up for decades, from the "Social Revolutionary Process" of 1922 and

The Shakhty affair of 1928 to the Great Moscow Trials of 1936-1938. over Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and others. These exemplary cases of the "enemies" have entered not only the consciousness, but also the subconscious of the population, revising them seemed too risky. The question of revising collectivization or red terror was not raised at all. On the whole, the Stalinist historical concept of the development of Soviet society, enshrined in his Short Course on the History of the CPSU (B.) (1938), remained unreviewed. Arguments to ensure that in the process of rehabilitation “not to take risks” were not only domestic political.

Khrushchev’s reaction after the XXII Congress to the proposal to publish the collected materials on the assassination of Kirov is characteristic: “If we publish everything, we will undermine our confidence in ourselves and the party in the world communist movement. And so after the XX Congress there were big fluctuations. And therefore, we won’t publish it yet, and in about 15 years we’ll return to this ”(from the memoirs of O. Shatunovskaya, a communist repressed under Stalin, freed under Khrushchev and collaborated in one of the rehabilitation commissions).

The main result of the rehabilitation of the Khrushchev era is the release of prisoners and the awakening of public consciousness, which had many consequences. It can hardly be considered that the rehabilitation provided a new legitimacy to the regime, as Khrushchev hoped, its half-heartedness was too obvious.

In 1964, Khrushchev was removed from power. In the next 20 years, rehabilitation did not already have the pathos and scale that was inherent in it under Khrushchev. It did not stop at all, it continued "in a declarative manner," but its political significance was completely lost. Gradually and cautiously, Stalin's assessments are changing. The ambiguity of Stalin’s assessment was also characteristic of Khrushchev (on the one hand, Stalin was a revolutionary, the head of state, although he made mistakes, and on the other, he was the creator of repression), under Brezhnev, they gradually stop talking about Stalin’s “mistakes” (repression), and they are increasingly talking about Stalin, the commander in chief during the war years, about Stalin, the "creator of the Great Victory."

The topic of repression fades into the background and is excluded from the official context, remaining the topic of acute public debate (partly legal, partly uncensored) between the "Stalinists" and "anti-Stalinists." This topic becomes one of the main topics of Samizdat, it becomes the most important (fundamental) motive for the emergence of the human rights movement in the USSR.

Regarding the digital results of the rehabilitation during this period, we have several not very matching figures.

On June 3, 1988, the chairman of the KGB, V. Chebrikov, in a note to the CPSU Central Committee, reported that “until 1962 1,197,847 people were rehabilitated from the number of repressed citizens. In the years 1962-1983, 157,055 people. ” In a Note to the Central Committee of the CPSU A. Yakovlev et al. Dated December 25, 1988, based, apparently, on data obtained from the same KGB of the USSR, it is indicated that so far “1,354,902 people have been rehabilitated, including in cases non-judicial organs 1,182,825 people. ” It turns out that in the second half of 1988, more than 150 thousand people were rehabilitated. However, according to other sources, no more than 20 thousand people were rehabilitated during this period. But our main questions are not the figures of 1988, but the earlier ones. According to many sources, the number of those rehabilitated during the Khrushchev era does not exceed 800 thousand people. Unfortunately, we do not have any other accurate data on this score, and although we consider the data of Chebrikov-Yakovlev to be too high, we are forced to use them. But even if about 800 thousand people were rehabilitated in the Khrushchev era, these results are still extremely significant.

The second stage of rehabilitation. 1988-1991

The era of glasnost immediately revived in public space mass discussions around the theme of Stalinism and repression. Newspapers 1987-89 crowded with journalistic and memoir articles on terror. In 1987, an informal group of young activists emerged, taking the name "Memorial" and collecting signatures under a letter to Gorbachev about the creation of a memorial complex for the victims of repression. Soon, the same groups were created in many regions, there was a Union movement, and in late 1988 and early 1989. - public organization "Memorial". Both former political prisoners of the Stalin era and human rights activists of the Brezhnev era, some of whom also went through the camps, take part in its creation. A little later, various associations, unions and unions of former victims begin to arise.

The calls to resume the rehabilitation process, restore justice in relation to the living, perpetuate the memory of the dead were heard by the authorities, and she begins to act energetically, trying to keep the initiative in her hands all the time.

On September 28, 1987, the Politburo establishes a special Commission "on additional study of materials related to the repressions that took place during the period of the 30-40s and the beginning of the 50s". The Commission confirms the general and party rehabilitation in a number of cases, prepares the Politburo Resolution “On the construction of a monument to the victims of repression”, prepares a draft Politburo Resolution “On additional measures to complete the work related to the rehabilitation of persons unreasonably repressed in the 30-40s and in beginning of the 50s. ” The decision was adopted on 07/11/1988. The decree prescribes rehabilitation, regardless of the availability of applications and complaints from citizens - and this, of course, is its strength and novelty. On the other hand, it is clear that from the point of view of chronology, the Politburo still remains within the Khrushchev framework - from the mid-1930s until the death of Stalin. In this regard, the public is constantly criticizing the authorities. “Memorial” recalls that the repressions were before the assassination of Kirov (December 1934), and did not end with the death of Stalin. In the fall of 1988, the Commission was headed by the closest associate of A. Gorbachev. Yakovlev, her work becomes even more intense. The Commission considers many high-profile cases and publishes the results of this work.

On January 16, 1989, the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR prepared by the Commission and approved by the Politburo was published. The decree ordered the abolition of all decisions made by extra-judicial bodies (triples, special meetings, etc.) and to recognize all citizens convicted by these bodies as rehabilitated. However, exceptions were immediately established: traitors to the motherland, punishers of the Great Patriotic War, “participants in nationalist gangs and their accomplices”, falsifiers of investigative cases, etc. were not subject to rehabilitation. The decree drew attention to the social support of the victims of repression, and - for the first time! - on the problem of perpetuating the memory of victims, ordering the local council together with public organizations to assist in the creation of monuments to the victims and also in the proper maintenance of their burial places. ”

The decree has become a powerful impetus in the rehabilitation process. In less than a year, by the beginning of 1990, 838,630 people were rehabilitated, 21,333 people were refused rehabilitation. The leading role in the rehabilitation was played by prosecutors, who, having examined the cases themselves, made decisions (mainly with the participation of the KGB or the Ministry of Internal Affairs - custodians of archival files) on rehabilitation. The judicial authorities, following the protests of prosecutors, rehabilitated from a total of less than 30 thousand people.

After the decree, local authorities could no longer dismiss the efforts and proposals of the public to perpetuate the memory of the victims. In 1989-1990 with the help of the KGB or public efforts, many places of mass burial of the executed were discovered (information about them was carefully hidden during all the years of Soviet power), commemorative signs (embedded stones or crosses) were placed in many cities (or at burial sites in the nearby suburbs) perceived then as temporary, but remained constant.

The decree, which generated many hopes and largely justified them, along with public support aroused much criticism. Former victims were dissatisfied with the fact that the Decree was not executed (or poorly executed) in terms of their (victims) social support - they expected from the authorities an increase in pensions, the return of housing lost as a result of repression, etc. The Russian public accentuated criticism on the chronological narrowness of rehabilitation under this Decree. In Ukraine and the Baltic states, many were unhappy with the exclusion of national resistance figures from the rehabilitation process, who in full accordance with Soviet tradition were referred to in the Decree as “participants in nationalist gangs”. Meanwhile, today, when we became aware of many party internal documents, you understand that it was unlikely that Gorbachev could have done more than he did in the real conditions then.

His next step on the path to rehabilitation marked a definite and significant evolution in understanding the past. Gorbachev’s decree (formally, the Decree of the President of the USSR) of August 13, 1990 “On the restoration of the rights of all victims of political repressions of the 1920s-1950s” is more declarative than practical. The report condemns "mass repressions, arbitrariness and lawlessness that were committed by the Stalinist leadership on behalf of the revolution, party, people," the border of repressions was attributed to the mid-1920s, i.e. shifted 10 years ago in comparison with all earlier acts, it speaks of the inconsistency of the rehabilitation process, which stopped in the mid-1960s. For the first time in state acts of this level, we see an appeal not only to justice, but also to law. Repressions are called "incompatible with the norms of civilization" and the Constitution. Gorbachev speaks of depriving the Soviet people of their freedoms, "which in a democratic society are considered natural and inalienable," that not only extrajudicial bodies, but also the courts have violated the elementary rules of legal proceedings. " The objects of rehabilitation, according to the Decree, were to be peasants deported during collectivization, as well as clergy and "citizens persecuted for religious reasons." The decree recognizes the repression of the 20-50s. "For political, social, national, religious and other reasons" "illegal, contrary to basic civil and socio-economic human rights" and offers to fully restore the rights of victims of these repressions. " In general, the Decree was, of course, a new word in the interpretation of repression at the highest state level. Unfortunately, the practical side of the Decree (order of execution) was not worked out and, in fact, it was not executed.

In general, apparently, real rehabilitation already in 1990 was proceeding at a clearly slower pace than in the previous 1989. Apparently, the general disorder of the state mechanism was affecting. Accurate data on the number of rehabilitated in 1990-1991. we do not have. The Politburo Rehabilitation Commission ceased to exist in the summer of 1990, announcing that its tasks had been completed. According to A.N. Yakovlev, unreviewed cases in the archives of the KGB at the beginning of 1990 remained 752 thousand. As the future showed, this figure was clearly underestimated.

On the whole, the Gorbachev era was a major breakthrough in understanding the past, including rehabilitation. On the one hand, rehabilitation was still narrowed - both chronologically and categorically. But the borders in both directions were constantly expanding. The rehabilitation process was quite effective in 1988-1991. about 1.5 million people were rehabilitated. In addition to the most important acts mentioned by us, at the all-Union level, many more have been issued that evaluate repression (in particular, repression against

"Punished peoples"). The theme of repression has returned to the spotlight. For better or worse, the authorities interacted with society in the rehabilitation and perpetuation of the memory of victims. For our topic, it is important that on the basis of Gorbachev’s rehabilitation acts and practices, to some extent, in a polemic, they developed the basic principles of the Russian Law on Rehabilitation, on the basis of which rehabilitation was carried out in Russia in all subsequent years.

The third stage of rehabilitation. 1992 - present. The law of the Russian Federation on rehabilitation.

The Russian Law on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression began to be prepared in the spring of 1990 immediately after the first free elections to the Supreme Council

RSFSR. The law was drafted by the Human Rights Committee, chaired by Sergei Kovalev, a human rights activist and political prisoner of the 1970s. The main author (leader of the working group) was deputy Anatoly Kononov, later a judge of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation. In addition to deputies and professional lawyers, the working group included representatives of Memorial Arseny Roginsky and Oleg Orlov.

Already in the early stages of preparation, the Law met many difficulties. There were three main difficulties.

Firstly, the opposition’s political preamble met the resistance of many deputies, which stated that all victims were subject to rehabilitation, starting from the first day of Soviet power (November 7, 1917) until the Law entered into force. Recall that in 1990 the USSR still existed and such a mention of the country's founding date was perceived as an attempt on the legitimacy of Soviet power. It is characteristic that the draft of the All-Union Law on Rehabilitation, which was being written (by whom?) At the same time, provided for a chronological framework from 1920 to 1959.

Another claim was quasi-legal in nature - the KGB of the USSR sent a negative response to the draft law, saying that the republican (Russian) parliament did not have the right to rehabilitate convicts by the all-Union bodies - and there were a significant part of those repressed. In addition, the KGB cynically declared that the chronological framework of rehabilitation should be narrowed, because, in his opinion, in the 1960s and 1980s. violations and falsifications during arrests and investigations were gone.

Another complaint is that the Law provided for individual rehabilitation, and there were many representatives of “punished peoples” among the deputies, and they demanded the inclusion in the Law of the relevant clauses relating to the territorial, cultural, political rehabilitation of entire nations. But it was quite obvious that the rehabilitation of peoples was to be the subject of a special law. The inclusion of clauses on “punished peoples” in this law would turn the law into a declaration and would decisively change the general concept.

As a result of these and other claims, the Law, when it was submitted to the Supreme Council for discussion on October 30, 1990, was withdrawn from the discussion and sent “for revision”. With minor amendments, the Law was adopted only a year later, on October 18, 1991, in the atmosphere of the aftermath of fear of the communist part of the deputies and the expectation of the imminent collapse of the USSR.

The law retained the preamble with the original chronological framework, as well as with the condemnation of terror as incompatible with the idea of \u200b\u200blaw and justice. The purpose of the law was declared not only the restoration of repressed in civil rights, but also "feasible at that time compensation for moral and material damage."

For the first time in the Russian legislation, the Law defines political repressions and introduces the concept of the “political motive” of the state. The circle of rehabilitated persons is clearly described. And here, for the first time, the victims of administrative repressions are listed: persons subjected to administrative exile, expulsion, special settlement, etc. These are deported peasants, and “punished peoples” and many others. Among those rehabilitated, they were named and placed for political reasons in special or general psychiatric hospitals. The law provides for automatic, i.e. without considering the case, the rehabilitation of people convicted of exercising their right to freedom of conscience and opinion.

The law contains exceptions. At first glance, it was possible to do without exceptions, greatly inhibiting the rehabilitation process. Moreover, most of the people for political reasons were convicted by extra-judicial authorities in absentia. It would seem that the easiest and most correct way is to cancel mechanically all decisions of these illegal organs without exception. But to do this is impossible. After all, these same bodies condemned unconditional criminals - war criminals and punishers, for example. Repeal the law of all extrajudicial sentences, and these punishers will be automatically rehabilitated. Of course, these people make up a very small percentage of the total mass of those rehabilitated, but still they will be rehabilitated, and this situation cannot be accepted by the Russian mass consciousness.

As a result, a list of exceptions was compiled, approximately the same as in the all-Union normative acts, but much shorter and more specific. The list of exceptions was based on a sign of a person committing violent acts, that is, crimes punishable in any country.

The law details the procedure for rehabilitation. Not only the victim or her relative, but also any interested person or public organization can apply for rehabilitation. Cases of convicted persons on an individual basis (stored mainly in the archives of state security bodies) are examined by prosecutors, who themselves make decisions on rehabilitation or refusal of it. All cases are reviewed, regardless of statements.

Cases of administrative repression, mainly stored in the archives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, are examined by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Here, the Law did not provide for a complete review of cases; rehabilitation is carried out on applications. This, of course, is a significant flaw of the Law.

The law describes in detail the consequences of rehabilitation - compensation, benefits for the rehabilitated, issues of returning property.

Immediately after the adoption of the Law, a struggle began to improve it. Initially, its center was the problem of expanding the circle of persons rehabilitated by the Law. Most of all, the victims' associations, as well as the Memorial society, insisted on this expansion.

As a result of many years of efforts, it was possible to ensure that children who were together with their parents in camps, exile, labor settlements (previously recognized as only victims) were recognized as victims of repression, and then children who remained as a result of the repressions at a minor age without the care of one or two parents . The result of the adoption of these amendments (both of which were introduced into the Law thanks to decisions of the Constitutional Court adopted in 1995 and 2000) was that strange, at first glance, fact that the number of rehabilitated victims of repression living in Russia in the late 1990s - early 2000s increased dramatically.

Unfortunately, no other significant changes to the Law were made.

Social status of victims

Already in Soviet times, some measures were taken not only for political, but also for social rehabilitation of victims. However, the peculiarity of social rehabilitation compared to legal was its extreme limitation.

Rehabilitated persons were entitled to monetary compensation in the amount of a two-month salary, calculated from the salary at the time of arrest, they could be out of turn to receive housing, the unemployed had the right to receive a pension, offsetting the length of service of the prison term.

However, many ordinary people - without connections and acquaintances - often did not even know about these opportunities. Former "enemies of the people", as well as members of their families, continued to be harassed even when this was not officially encouraged. In particular, not all rehabilitated received permission to return to their places of former residence, no restitution was supposed upon return. People did not receive back, neither seized housing nor confiscated property. The only thing that some of those who returned was the possibility of preferential registration for housing and receiving in an accelerated manner significantly worse and smaller housing.

In the case of administratively deportees, social rehabilitation was fundamentally different for different categories of deportees. Some were allowed to return to their former places of residence, and this is the maximum of what they could count on; others (dispossessed or Crimean Tatars, for example) were unofficially prevented even from returning.

In fact, in Soviet times, in a social sense, rehabilitated victims were divided into three groups:

1. deported by administrative procedure, which were actually not rehabilitated, but pardoned;
2. the majority of convicts in a judicial or quasi-judicial order and subsequently rehabilitated, who received scanty monetary compensation and extremely limited opportunities for social adaptation in a new life
3. a relatively small group of former party-statesmen and their relatives who received not only legal, but also party rehabilitation, which meant, in particular, the return of not only better housing, cottages and other privileges compared to other ones, but also the opportunity to return to their previous work.

In general, growing former victims into a new life was very difficult and painful. With a camp past, it was hard to count on decent work and housing. The atmosphere around these people often remained wary and hostile. The stigma of the “enemy of the people" continued to haunt the former prisoners themselves and their families. Their life remained unsettled and dysfunctional, for the most part they did not make a career, did not restore their lost family and family ties. Many, having spent the best years of their life in prison, did not create families at all, did not have children and support, and were in dire need.

Only the Rehabilitation Act of 10/18/1991 established a system of compensation payments and benefits for these people, namely:

1. One-time monetary compensation for the period of imprisonment or staying on compulsory psychiatric treatment.
2. Compensation for damage caused by unlawful seizure of property.
3. Payment of increased pension.
4. In-kind benefits (payment of housing and utilities in the amount of 50%, priority telephone installation and reimbursement of expenses for its installation, free travel in public and suburban automobile, electric, railway and water public transport, as well as compensation once a year for the fare on the territory of the Russian Federation on intercity transport, manufacturing and repair of dentures, preferential sanatorium-resort treatment).

However, the proposed set of measures, which at first glance gives the opportunity to socially support the victims, in reality gave them humiliatingly little.

For example, at the time of the adoption of the Law, one-time compensation amounted to “three quarters of the minimum wage established by law for each month of imprisonment”, and in 2000 it was generally fixed at 75 rubles (less than 2 euros). This means that a former prisoner for 10 years of Kolyma camps receives a one-time compensation of 220 euros !.

Compensation for the loss of a home, whether it is a confiscated apartment in Moscow or a house in a village, cannot exceed 10,000 rubles (250 euros!).

In the early 2000s, when, thanks to rising oil prices, the Russian state became richer and, it would seem, it became possible to provide adequate support to the victims, the government decided to monetize the benefits. Having forgotten that in 1991, when the Law on Rehabilitation was adopted, it actually provided the victims not with benefits, but prolonged compensation in the form of regular benefits.

The monetization of benefits carried out in 2005 completely changed the basis for the social security of victims - instead of benefits, rehabilitated victims receive monthly cash payments (EDV), and financing of payments is provided not by the federal budget, but by the regional budgets of the federal subjects.

In a legal sense, the situation has become absurd on at least two grounds:

The fact is that people with disabilities, depending on the disability group, receive 1,620-2,830 rubles (40.5-70.5 euros) from the federal budget every month. At a general level, this is a good and most importantly stable monthly support.

From a legal point of view, persons with disabilities who are victims of political repressions should receive social support on two grounds, all the more so since there is a precedent for this in Russia - the liquidators of the Chernobyl accident receive support in this way.

Nevertheless, the social services of Russia do not recognize the right of the rehabilitated to receive double support and, in fact, require to obtain the status of a disabled person to renounce the status of rehabilitated.

As Margarita Anisimova, one of the Memorial activists, said: “They demand that I admit that I am disabled and renounce the status of a victim of political repressions. I will never do this, even if people with disabilities will be paid ten times more. Refusing victim status means refusing to rehabilitate my executed parents. ”

Necessary amendments to the Law on Rehabilitation

Meanwhile, the following major amendments to the Law on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression are necessary:

The first one.It is necessary to expand the circle of persons to be rehabilitated.

In 1990-1991, when the Law was being prepared, some of the types of repressions were not directly spelled out in the Law. This raised doubts among rehabilitating prosecutors about certain categories of victims. Doubts were most often resolved by them in favor of denial of rehabilitation. This happened, for example, with the "deprived people" - people deprived of suffrage in 1918-1936. The number of this category was high - at least 4 million people. It included pre-revolutionary officials, and merchants, and the former clergy, and small artisans, and many others. The deprivation of electoral rights in the first decades after the revolution in real life entailed many consequences - non-admission to higher education institutions, to many duty stations, etc.

The Law includes not only those arrested or direct victims of administrative repressions, but also persons subjected to “other restrictions of rights and freedoms” as subject to rehabilitation.

Almost none of the "deprived" is already alive, but for many descendants the fact of rehabilitation of their relatives seems important. For us, the rehabilitation of these people is important not only as a fact of restoration of historical justice, but also as a statement of one of the unshakable principles of Law.

There are several other categories (not so many) of victims that should be explicitly listed in the Act.

The second one.It is necessary to introduce a norm into the Law, which will allow for rehabilitation in a situation where a criminal (investigative) case is lost or destroyed.

The existing order requires a case to review it. In some cases, this issue is fundamentally important. So, for example, prosecutors refer to the absence of a case, refusing to rehabilitate the victims of the mass execution of Polish citizens in 1940 (Katyn and other places).

But there are no such cases in the executed Poles in nature - the cases were deliberately (in order to hide the traces of the crime) destroyed in the late 1950s.

Moreover, there are many other (except for investigative cases) documents that allow you to name the victims and prove that the “Katyn crime” was committed at the direction of the highest Soviet leadership. These documents should be considered for the rehabilitation of victims.

The third.  The article of the Law, which lists exceptions (that is, persons, although convicted, but not subject to rehabilitation), names those who committed “crimes against justice”. The preamble to this article states that the grounds for refusing rehabilitation should be evidence contained in the “cases” of such persons.

In practice, this category is represented only by employees of the bodies of the OGPU-N-KVD-MGB. Many of them were indeed repressed. In the Soviet era, many were rehabilitated, but the most odious figures were denied rehabilitation. Mostly, rehabilitation was refused to the regional chiefs-chairmen of extra-judicial bodies (“triples”) 1937-1938, heads of departments of the central apparatus of the OGPU-NKVD, investigators of high-profile cases that became known in the Khrushchev era.

The 1991 Rehabilitation Act gave birth to new practices. Very often in the investigative cases of such people there was no indication that they had committed crimes against justice. They were convicted on fictitious charges of espionage or conspiracy against the Soviet government. Based on the letter of the law, prosecutors in the 1990s and 2000s began to rehabilitate them. Including those that used to be - in the 1960-1980s. rehabilitation was denied.

Thus, D. Dmitriev was rehabilitated, under whose leadership many thousands of citizens were shot in the Sverdlovsk Region, V. Agas, an investigator in the case of Marshal Tukhachevsky, known for the constant use of torture, D. Apresyan, head of the Great Terror of 1937-1938. in Uzbekistan, Y. Agranov is one of the main leaders of terror against the intelligentsia in the 1920s and 1930s. and many others.

It is necessary to amend the article of the Law and indicate that when it comes to employees of state security, internal affairs, the prosecution system is required

thoroughly check not only investigative cases, but also conduct special checks of their activities on additional archival materials.

During the rehabilitation of large party workers, about whom there is information about their participation in terror, additional archival materials must also be raised.

Fourth.  It is necessary to amend the norm of the Law regarding the rehabilitation of victims of administrative repressions (this is done by the Ministry of Internal Affairs). Instead of rehabilitating according to separate statements, a complete review of cases should be carried out. Otherwise, millions of victims will remain unrehabilitated.

Fifth. The law practically does not solve the problems of perpetuating the memory of victims. It is said only about compiling “lists of rehabilitated persons”. However, it is not indicated who should compile them and how, who should publish them. “Lists” have long been transformed into “Books of memory”, which are prepared and published in most regions on the initiative of various organizations - public and state. This is done without any common principles. And in a number of regions this work is not being conducted at all. The law does not contain the task of creating museum and memorial complexes dedicated to victims, searching and memorializing mass graves of victims, installing monuments and memorials. We believe that a special chapter should be introduced into the Law on the perpetuation of the memory of victims.

Sixth.  The Russian law on rehabilitation is not fully combined with the same laws of the countries neighboring Russia - the former republics of the USSR. Not only individuals, but entire categories of victims, it is impossible to rehabilitate due to contradictions and gaps in the laws. To solve these problems, it is necessary to introduce small adjustments to Russian law. In addition, special agreements must be concluded between countries interested in the rehabilitation process.

We can cite many examples of the necessary additions and clarifications to the Law. Over the 20 years of the operation of the Law on Rehabilitation, its strengths and weaknesses have been fully manifested. Unfortunately, the deputies of the Russian parliament every time push aside almost any amendments to the Law - the topic of repressions clearly does not find their response.

The results of rehabilitation under the Law of October 18, 1991

In 1992, immediately after the adoption of the Law, special groups were formed in the bodies of the Prosecutor's Office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs throughout the country. They worked actively during the 1990s, then the stream of rehabilitated weakened, in the mid-2000s. (earlier in some regions) these groups were disbanded.

In 1992-2010 was rehabilitated:

• 800-805 thousand people - by the prosecution authorities (including the military prosecution authorities);
• about 280 thousand children of victims of repression, in connection with changes in the Law on Rehabilitation in the 2000s. prosecutors recognized children as victims of political repression;
• more than 2 million 940 thousand people - the Ministry of Internal Affairs rehabilitated for administrative repressions.

Today, rehabilitation in the affairs of the state security organs (“on individual charges”) is considered almost completed in Russia. Many disagree with this statement. In particular, in the opinion of Memorial, many cases should be re-reviewed, in which refusals of rehabilitation were received - this is especially true during the Civil and Great Patriotic Wars.

The rehabilitation of the repressed in administrative order should continue - it is so far far from complete.

Finally, in order for society to be able to really assess the results of rehabilitation, society does not have enough general figures, which are periodically, for various random reasons, called the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB, the Prosecutor's Office. These departments should transfer the personal information at their disposal about the rehabilitated victims of repression into a single national database. In order for them to do this, they must first get the federal government to proclaim its creation of such a base.

In Russia, there is successful experience in creating a national database of victims of the Great Patriotic War. So far, it has not been possible to achieve a state decision to create a base where the names of all victims of political repressions will be included. Although society (including Memorial) has been demanding this for many years.

Ideally, such a database should include data not only from Russian archives, but also from archives of countries of the former Soviet republics. In these countries (unfortunately, not all), the rehabilitation of victims has also been going on for many years. But its results are unknown to us. Therefore, it is not yet possible to answer the question which part of the total number of victims of Soviet repressions has been rehabilitated to date.

According to the Ministry of Labor of the Russian Federation at the beginning of 2013, people with victim status in accordance with the Law on Rehabilitation today are 776.667 people. Over the past two years, according to the same official data, their number has decreased by 230 thousand and continues to rapidly decline.

Alas, the Rehabilitation Law is still the only law on the past. It is about restoring the rights of a huge number of people affected by the state, who today are mostly old, lonely and seriously ill.

But this first and important step towards assessing the Soviet regime remained the only one. Since the authorities are instrumental in history, it sometimes recalls the victims, depending on its interests, but mostly prefers not to talk about them. And so the victims of political repression, as before, remain between the compassion and indifference of the state and society.

Elena Zhemkova, Arseny Roginsky

1. An accurate assessment is not possible due to fragmentary statistics, in particular the lack of information about the victims of the judicial executions of the red and white terror. Approximate estimates of losses are given- Vadim V. Erlikhman. Population losses in the twentieth century .: Reference // M .: Russian Panorama Publishing House, 2004. The documented figures we rely on are significantly lower (see below)
2. Military specialist - short for "military specialist." The concept was used in the early years of Soviet power and meant "a military specialist of the old Russian army, serving in the Red Army."
3. Assessment of the Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, 2000
4. On October 6, 1991, the Decree of the President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin on the dissolution of the CPSU and the prohibition of the activities of its army and production organizations, which legally enshrined the dismantling of the CPSU, which ruled the country autocratically for more than seventy years.
5. Victor V. Luneev. Political crime // Moscow, State and Law, 1994. No. 7. P. 107-127
6. The table below includes data from the reports of the military counterintelligence agencies SMERSH (Death to Spies) for 1943-1946.
7. See: Pavel M. Polyan. Not voluntarily // M., 2001; Stalin's deportations: 1928-1953 // Compiled by Nikolai Pobol., Pavel Polyan // M., 2005.
8. Grigory Pomerants. The investigation is conducted by convict // M., Peak. 2004, p. 151.
9. Rehabilitation: how it was. Documents of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU, transcripts of the meeting of the Commission of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU on additional study of materials related to the repressions that took place during the 30s and 40s and early 50s, and other materials // M., MFD, 2004, T .3, p. 77.
10. Rehabilitation: how it was ... V.3, p. 142.
11. Rehabilitation: how it was .. V.3, p. 197-198.
12. Rehabilitation: how it was ... V.3, p. 345.
13. Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 1655 of 09/08/1955 "On seniority, employment and pensions of citizens unreasonably prosecuted and subsequently rehabilitated" // Sat. laws and regulations on repression and rehabilitation of victims of political repression. M., publishing house "Republic", 1993.
14. From the Report of the Presidential Commission on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, 2011.
15. accurate parenting information
16. Lichen is the unofficial name of a citizen of the USSR or union republics, in 1918-1936. deprived of suffrage according to the Constitutions of the RSFSR of 1918 and 1925. According to the results of the 1926 All-Union Census, the population in the USSR was 147,027,915 people. There were 1,040,894 people deprived of voting rights (1.63% of the total number of voters). 43.3% of them were traders and intermediaries. Then clergymen and monks followed - 15.2%; living on unearned income - 13.8%; former tsarist officers and other ranks - 9%. Adult (over 18 years) members of families of deprived persons also did not have the right to vote. Those were 6.4%. In 1927, 3,038,739 people (4.27% of voters) did not have the right to vote. By this time, among deprived persons, the number of traders (to 24.8%) and clergymen (to 8.3%) decreased, but the number of family members affected by their rights increased to 38.5%. All-Union Census of 1926. M.: Publication of the Central Statistical Bureau of the USSR, 1928-29. For more on the fate of the deprived, see Krasilnikov S.A. On the breaks in the social structure: Marginals in the post-revolutionary Russian society (1917 - late 1930s). - Novosibirsk, NSU, 1998.
17. Y. Kantor "Living and the Dead." Russian Newspaper, Federal Issue No. 6088 (112), 05/28/2013

The history of Russia, as well as other former post-Soviet republics from 1928 to 1953, is called the "Stalin era". He is positioned as a wise ruler, a brilliant statesman, acting on the basis of "expediency". In reality, they were driven by completely different motives.

Talking about the beginning of the political career of a leader who has become a tyrant, such authors bashfully ignore one indisputable fact: Stalin was a convict-recidivist with seven “walkers”. Robbery and violence were the main form of his social activity in his youth. Repression has become an integral component of his state course.

Lenin received in his person a worthy successor. “Having creatively developed his teaching,” Joseph Vissarionovich came to the conclusion that the country should be governed by terror methods, constantly inspiring fear among its fellow citizens.

A generation of people whose lips can tell the truth about Stalin’s repressions is leaving ... Aren't the newfangled articles that bleach the dictator a spit on their suffering, on their broken life ...

Chief Authorizing Torture

As you know, Joseph Vissarionovich personally signed the shooting lists for 400,000 people. In addition, Stalin tightened repression as much as possible, authorizing the use of torture during interrogations. They were given the green light to complete lawlessness in the dungeons. It was directly related to the notorious telegram of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks dated 10.01.1939, which literally untied the hands of punitive organs.

Creativity in introducing torture

Recall excerpts from a letter from the commander of Lisovsky, who is pushed by the satraps of the leader ...

"... A ten-day conveyor interrogation with a cruel, vicious beating and without the possibility of falling asleep. Then a twenty-day punishment cell. Further, forcing him to sit with his arms raised up, and also to bend, with his head hidden under the table, for 7-8 hours ..."

The desire of the detainees to prove their innocence and their failure to sign fabricated charges led to increased torture and beatings. The social status of the detainees did not play a role. Recall that Robert Eikhe, a candidate member of the Central Committee, broke his spine during interrogation, and Marshal Blucher in Lefortovo prison died from beating during interrogations.

Leader Motivation

The number of victims of Stalin’s repressions was calculated not by tens, not hundreds of thousands, but by seven million who died of starvation and four million arrested (the general statistics will be presented below). Only the number of executed was about 800 thousand people ...

How did Stalin motivate his actions, immensely striving for Olympus power?

What does Anatoly Rybakov write about this in The Children of the Arbat? Analyzing the personality of Stalin, he shares with us his opinions. “The ruler whom the people love is weak, because his power is based on the emotions of other people. Another thing is when people are afraid of him! Then the power of the ruler depends on himself. This is a strong ruler! ”Hence, the leader’s credo is to inspire self-love through fear!

Steps adequate to this idea were taken by Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. Repression has become his main competitive tool in his political career.

The beginning of revolutionary activity

Joseph Vissarionovich became interested in revolutionary ideas at the age of 26 after meeting V.I. Lenin. He was engaged in the robbery of funds for the party treasury. Fate gave him 7 links to Siberia. Stalin was distinguished by pragmatism, prudence, illegibility in means, rigidity towards people, egocentrism from a young age. Repression of financial institutions - robbery and violence - was his. Then the future leader of the party participated in the Civil War.

Stalin in the Central Committee

In 1922, Joseph Vissarionovich receives the long-awaited career opportunity. Ailing and weakening Vladimir Ilyich introduces him along with Kamenev and Zinoviev to the Central Committee of the party. Thus, Lenin creates a political counterweight to Leon Trotsky, who really claims to be a leader.

Stalin simultaneously heads two party structures: the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee and the Secretariat. In this post, he brilliantly studied the art of party undercover intrigues, which was useful to him further in the fight against competitors.

Stalin's positioning in the system of red terror

The machine of red terror was launched before Stalin came to the Central Committee.

09/05/1918 The Council of People's Commissars issues the Resolution "On the Red Terror." The body for its implementation, called the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (VChK), operated under the Council of People's Commissars from 12/07/1917.

The reason for this radicalization of domestic politics was the murder of M. Uritsky, chairman of the St. Petersburg Cheka, and the assassination of V. Lenin, Fanny Kaplan, acting from the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Both events occurred on 08.30.1918. Already this year, the Cheka launched a wave of repression.

According to statistical information, 21,988 people were arrested and imprisoned; 3061 hostages taken; 5544 were executed, 1791 were imprisoned in concentration camps.

By the time the Stalin Central Committee arrived, gendarmes, policemen, tsarist officials, entrepreneurs, landowners had already been repressed. First of all, a blow was struck to the classes, which are the pillar of the monarchical structure of society. However, "creatively developing the teachings of Lenin," Joseph Vissarionovich outlined new main lines of terror. In particular, a course was taken to destroy the village’s social base - agricultural entrepreneurs.

Stalin since 1928 - ideologist of violence

It was Stalin who turned repressions into the main instrument of domestic policy, which he justified theoretically.

His concept of reinforcing the class struggle formally becomes the theoretical basis for the constant escalation of violence by state authorities. The country shuddered when it was first voiced by Joseph Vissarionovich at the July Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU (B.) In 1928. Since that time, he has actually become the leader of the Party, the inspirer and ideologist of violence. The tyrant declared war on his own people.

Hidden by slogans, the real meaning of Stalinism is manifested in the unbridled pursuit of power. Its essence is shown by the classic - George Orwell. The Englishman showed very clearly that power for this ruler was not a means, but a goal. He no longer perceived the dictatorship as a defense of the revolution. The revolution has become a means to establish a personal unlimited dictatorship.

Joseph Vissarionovich in 1928-1930 He began by initiating fabrication by the OGPU of a number of public processes that plunged the country into an atmosphere of shock and fear. So, with the judges and terrifying of the whole society, the cult of the personality of Stalin began its formation ... Mass repressions were accompanied by public recognition of those who committed non-existent crimes as "enemies of the people." People were cruelly tortured to sign trumped-up charges by the investigation. The brutal dictatorship imitated the class struggle, cynically violating the Constitution and all the norms of universal morality ...

Three global trials were falsified: “Union Bureau Case” (jeopardizing managers); “The Case of the Industrial Party” (the wrecking of the Western powers with respect to the economy of the USSR was simulated) “The Work of the Peasant Labor Party” (obvious falsification of damage to the seed stock and procrastination with mechanization). Moreover, they all united in a single cause in order to create the appearance of a single conspiracy against the Soviet regime and provide scope for further falsifications of the organs of the OGPU - the NKVD.

As a result, the entire economic management of the national economy was replaced from the old "specialists" to "new personnel" who were ready to work according to the instructions of the "leader."

Through the mouth of Stalin, who ensured the state apparatus loyal to repression by the courts, the Party’s unshakable determination was expressed: to oust and ruin thousands of entrepreneurs — industrialists, merchants, small and medium-sized; to destroy the basis of agricultural production - the prosperous peasantry (indiscriminately calling it "fists). Moreover, the new voluntarist party position was masked by the "will of the poorest layers of workers and peasants."

Behind the scenes, parallel to this “general line”, the “father of peoples”, successively, with the help of provocations and perjury, a line was launched to liquidate its party rivals for the highest state power (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev).

Violent collectivization

The truth about the repression of Stalin during the period 1928-1932. testifies that the main social base of the village, an effective agricultural producer, has become the main object of repression. The goal is clear: the whole peasant country (and Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic republics and the Transcaucasia actually at that time) was supposed to turn under the pressure of repressions from a self-sufficient economic complex into an obedient donor for implementing Stalin's plans for industrialization and maintaining hypertrophied power structures.

In order to clearly identify the object of his repressions, Stalin went for an obvious ideological forgery. Economically and socially unreasonably, he ensured that party ideologists obedient to him singled out a normal self-supporting (profitable) producer into a separate “class of fists” - the target of a new blow. Under the ideological leadership of Joseph Vissarionovich, a plan was developed to destroy the centuries-old social foundations of the village, the destruction of the rural community - Resolution "On the Elimination ... of Kulak Farms" dated 01/30/1930

Red terror came to the village. The peasants, who fundamentally disagree with the collectivization, were subjected to Stalinist courts, the “troika,” which in most cases ended in executions. Less active “kulaks”, as well as “kulak families” (in the category of which any persons subjectively defined as a “rural asset” could fall) were subjected to forced confiscation of property and eviction. A body of permanent operational management of the eviction was created - a secret operational management under the leadership of Efim Evdokimov.

Migrants to the extreme regions of the North, victims of Stalin’s repressions, were previously determined by number in the Volga region, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Siberia, and the Urals.

In 1930-1931 1.8 million were evicted, and in 1932-1940. - 0.49 million people.

Famine organization

However, executions, ruin and eviction in the 30s of the last century are not all the repressions of Stalin. A brief listing of them should be supplemented by the organization of hunger. Its real reason was the inadequate approach of Joseph Vissarionovich personally to inadequate grain procurement in 1932. Why is the plan implemented only 15-20%? The main reason was crop failure.

At stake was his subjectively designed industrialization plan. It would be reasonable to reduce plans by 30%, to postpone them, and at first to stimulate the agricultural producer and wait for the crop year ... Stalin did not want to wait, he demanded immediate provision of food to the swollen power structures and new giant construction projects - Donbass, Kuzbass. The leader made a decision - to withdraw from the peasants grain intended for sowing and for consumption.

On October 22, 1932, two emergency commissions led by the odious personalities Lazar Kaganovich and Vyacheslav Molotov launched a hateful campaign of “fighting with the fists” to seize bread, which was accompanied by violence, speedy trials of the triplets and the eviction of wealthy farmers in the Far North. It was genocide ...

It is noteworthy that the cruelty of the satraps was actually initiated and not stopped by Joseph Vissarionovich himself.

Known fact: correspondence between Sholokhov and Stalin

Massive repressions of Stalin in 1932-1933 have documentary evidence. M. A. Sholokhov, the author of The Quiet Don, turned to the leader, defending his fellow countrymen, with letters, exposing lawlessness when confiscating grain. Substantially, with the indication of the villages, the names of the victims and their tormentors, the famous resident of the village of Veshenskaya set out the facts. Bullying and violence against the peasants are horrifying: brutal beatings, breaking joints, partial strangulation, staging execution, eviction from homes ... In a response letter, Joseph Vissarionovich only partially agreed with Sholokhov. The real position of the leader is visible in the lines where he calls the peasants saboteurs, "quietly" trying to disrupt the provision of food ...

Such a voluntaristic approach caused hunger in the Volga region, Ukraine, the North Caucasus, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Siberia, and the Urals. A special statement issued by the Russian State Duma in April 2008 revealed previously classified statistics to society (earlier propaganda hid Stalin’s repressions in every way.)

How many people died from starvation in the above regions? The figure set by the State Duma Commission is horrifying: more than 7 million.

Other areas of pre-war Stalinist terror

We also consider three more areas of Stalinist terror, and in the following table we will present in more detail each of them.

With the sanctions of Joseph Vissarionovich, a policy was also pursued to oppress freedom of conscience. A citizen of the Land of Soviets was supposed to read the newspaper Pravda, and not go to church ...

Hundreds of thousands of families of previously productive peasants, fearing dispossession and exile to the North, have become the army providing the country's gigantic construction projects. In order to limit their rights and make them manipulative, it was at that time that the population was certified in cities. Only 27 million people received passports. Peasants (still the majority of the population) remained passportless, not enjoying the full scope of civil rights (freedom of choice of place of residence, freedom of choice of work) and “tied” to the collective farm at the place of residence with a prerequisite for fulfilling workdays.

Antisocial policy was accompanied by the destruction of families, an increase in the number of street children. This phenomenon has acquired such a scale that the state was forced to respond to it. With the sanction of Stalin, the Politburo of the Country of Soviets issued one of the most inhumane decrees - punitive in relation to children.

The anti-religious offensive as of April 1, 1936 led to the reduction of Orthodox churches to 28%, mosques to 32% of their pre-revolutionary number. The number of clergymen decreased from 112.6 thousand to 17.8 thousand.

With the repressive purpose, the passportization of the urban population was carried out. More than 385 thousand people did not receive a passport and were forced to leave the city. 22.7 thousand people were arrested.

One of Stalin’s most cynical crimes is his sanctioning of the secret decision of the Politburo of 04/07/1935, which allows juveniles from 12 years of age to be brought to trial and sentencing them to the death penalty. Only in 1936, 125 thousand children were placed in colonies of the NKVD. As of April 1, 1939, 10 thousand children were exiled to the Gulag system.

Great terror

The state flywheel of terror was gaining momentum ... The power of Joseph Vissarionovich, beginning in 1937, as a result of repressions over the whole of society, became comprehensive. However, their biggest leap was just ahead. In addition to the final and already physical reprisal against former party colleagues — Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev — there were massive “purges of the state apparatus”.

Terror has reached unprecedented proportions. The OGPU (since 1938 - the NKVD) responded to all complaints and anonymous letters. Life was broken for a man in one carelessly dropped word ... Even the Stalinist elite was repressed - statesmen: Kosior, Eikhe, Postyshev, Goloshchekin, Vareikis; military leaders Blucher, Tukhachevsky; security officers Yagoda, Yezhov.

On the eve of World War II, leading military personnel were shot in trumped-up cases “under an anti-Soviet plot”: 19 qualified commanders at the level of the corps — divisions with combat experience. The cadres who came to replace them did not possess the appropriate operational and tactical skills.

Not only the showcase facades of Soviet cities characterized the cult of personality of Stalin. The repressions of the “leader of the peoples” gave rise to a monstrous system of GULAG camps, providing the Country of the Soviets with free labor, a mercilessly exploited labor resource for extracting the wealth of the underdeveloped regions of the Far North and Central Asia.

The dynamics of the increase in the camps and labor colonies is impressive: in 1932 it was about 140 thousand prisoners, and in 1941 - about 1.9 million.

In particular, ironically, convicts of Kolyma mined 35% of allied gold, while living in terrible conditions of detention. We list the main camps that are part of the GULAG system: Solovetsky (45 thousand prisoners), logging sites - Svirlag and Temnikovo (respectively 43 and 35 thousand); oil and coal production - Ukhtapechlag (51 thousand); chemical industry - Bereznyakov and Solikamsk (63 thousand); development of the steppes - Karaganda camp (30 thousand); construction of the Volga-Moscow canal (196 thousand); construction of the BAM (260 thousand); gold mining in Kolyma (138 thousand); Nickel mining in Norilsk (70 thousand).

Mostly people stayed in the Gulag system in a typical way: after an overnight arrest and an unjust biased trial. And although this system was created under Lenin, it was precisely under Stalin that political prisoners began to enter it en masse after mass courts: “enemies of the people” - kulaks (in fact, an efficient agricultural producer), or even entire expelled nationalities. Most served a term of 10 to 25 years under article 58. The process of investigation on it involved torture and a break in the will of the convict.

In the case of the resettlement of kulaks and small nations, the train with prisoners stopped right in the taiga or in the steppe and the convicts themselves built a camp and a special prison (TON). Since the 1930s, the labor of prisoners has been mercilessly exploited to carry out five-year plans - 12-14 hours each. Tens of thousands of people died from overwork, poor nutrition, and poor medical support.

Instead of a conclusion

Years of repression of Stalin - from 1928 to 1953. - changed the atmosphere in a society that has ceased to believe in justice, which is under the pressure of constant fear. Since 1918, people have been accused and shot by revolutionary tribunals. The inhuman system developed ... The tribunal became the Cheka, then the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, then the OGPU, then the NKVD. The executions of the 58th article were valid until 1947, and then Stalin replaced them with 25 years of serving in the camps.

In total, about 800 thousand people were shot.

The moral and physical tortures of the entire population of the country, in fact, lawlessness and arbitrariness, were carried out on behalf of the workers and peasants, the revolution.

The disenfranchised people were terrorized by the Stalinist system constantly and methodically. The beginning of the process of restoring justice was laid by the XX Congress of the CPSU.