"Dictator and Murderer": A pensioner from the Sverdlovsk region was convicted of insulting Stalin.
The Sverdlovsk Regional Court sentenced the 75-year-old Nikolai Dolgushin A suspended sentence of one year and two months was issued for "rehabilitating Nazism on the internet." The charges stemmed from two comments on Odnoklassniki.
"World War II was started by the dictator and murderer Stalin," "You're lying, Russian pig, it was the murderer and dictator Stalin who declared war on peaceful Poland," — Dolgushin wrote in September 2023 and February 2024.
The pensioner was also banned from using the internet for a year and a half, ordered to register with a psychiatrist, and undergo outpatient treatment, a Mediazona correspondent reports from the courtroom. The prosecution had requested a sentence of eighteen months in a penal colony for Nikolai Dolgushin.
In recent years, Russian authorities have increasingly engaged in the glorification and whitewashing of the figure Joseph Stalin. New monuments to him are being erected in the regions (17 this year alone), school curricula and the rhetoric of officials are being changed.
At the same time, legislation, particularly the article on the "rehabilitation of Nazism," is being used to suppress any historical assessments that contradict the new official narrative, and equates criticism of the dictator with one of the most serious crimes in the Russian legal system.
