Stalin's descendants have lost their court case to protect the honour and dignity of the Leader of the Nations, Joseph Jughashvili (Stalin).
By dismissing the lawsuit filed by Stalin's grandson against Novaya Gazeta and Anatoly Yablokov, the author of an article in a special issue called "The Truth About The Gulag" which outraged Stalinists, the Basmanny District Court of Moscow upheld the legitimacy of the statements challenged by the plaintiffs.
Here are excerpts of what Novaya Gazeta published:
"... Stalin and the Cheka are linked by the rivers of blood they spilled and the unspeakable crimes they committed together..." (Initially the lawsuit contained the full quotation from Yablokov, which continues, "crimes, above all, against their own people," however the plaintiffs' representatives removed this part during the session in order to focus attention on the Katyn case).
"...Stalin and the members of the Politbureau of the AUCP(B), who issued a binding order to execute the Poles, have evaded moral responsibility for that heinous crime..."
"...The former Father of the Nations... was in reality a blood-thirsty cannibal..." (For some reason, the plaintiffs' representatives dropped the reference to Stalin as "Father of the Nations").
There is now ample justification to claim that Stalin has been declared a criminal at the level of the Moscow District Court. From now on anyone is free to describe him as a "blood-thirsty cannibal".
It is no accident that in his statement Genri Reznik, the lawyer for Novaya Gazeta and the international human rights group Memorial (the third person on the respondent's side), described this hearing as a prelude to a Nuremberg Trial of Stalinism. Indeed, the plaintiff's representatives also described the trial as historic.
But that was the only fact the plaintiffs and respondents saw eye to eye on. The plaintiffs' representative Yuri Mukhin, an author of marginal books and a journalist for the newspaper Duel, while rightly noting that a traitor hates the people he betrays, called the respondents traitors just like Khrushchev who, he claimed, had betrayed Stalin, and the deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, who declared the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact invalid. Mr Mukhin went even further, telling the court that one cannot take Judas's opinion of Christ seriously, and that the Bolshevik Party and Stalin were like Christ in that they were also building a glorious future.
And all the Judases are naturally liars, "automatically liars, like Reznik". Mr Mukhin included among the lying Judases the president of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev, Alexander Yakovlev, all Russian archivists, and even the investigators at the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office. Perhaps this explains why another representative of the plaintiff, Sergey Strygin, demanded that Stalin's execution lists, which the court included in the respondent's submission, be read out. It contained about 44,000 names.
This wasn't the only time the plaintiffs' representatives proved to be way off the mark. Leonid Zhura described Stalin as the first democrat. The reason? Stalin's constitution, the "world's most democratic", and the happy life enjoyed by the Soviet people in the 1930s. After all, the people at the 1937 demonstrations were smiling (as if they had a choice of whether to smile or whether to take part in the demonstrations in the first place - O.Kh.).
Yuri Mukhin was constantly pushing the court proceedings into the realm of theatre of the absurd. One example will have to suffice for lack of space. It involves Mr Mukhin explaining to the court why the 116-volume Katyn Case was classified material.
In Mr Mukhin's enlightened opinion (and he calls himself a historian, among other things), since Gorbachev and Yeltsin had handed over part of the Katyn documents to Poland and had apologized for the execution of the Polish officers, and now that Vladimir Putin has described the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as immoral (as recently as September 1, 2009) the 116-volume Katyn Case allegedly containing definitive proof that the Poles had been shot by the Nazi occupiers was classified in 2004 so as not to discredit three presidents at once. In other words, in Mr Mukhin's enlightened opinion, Russia is covering up a Nazi crime so as not to expose Putin, Gorbachev and the late Yeltsin.
All this gave me a somewhat risky idea (risky in terms of civil law procedure): perhaps we respondents should have demanded a psychiatric evaluation be administered to some of the plaintiffs' representatives. When common sense is so obviously lacking, elementary logic is ignored and our value system is turned upside down--this is if not a symptom but the very definition of serious mental illness.
I decided to share my idea with the court, only to be shot down by Judge Lopatkina. And the wise Reznik hissed at me from his seat. They were right to. Even so, shortly before my remark, Mr Mukhin accused the respondents of being schizophrenic on the grounds that Anatoly Yablokov had petitioned for the removal of criminal case No.159 (Katyn Case), which he studied in 1990-1994. Yablokov was in a position to corroborate every word in this article, which has provoked such an outrage among Stalinists.
The theatre of the absurd performance staged by the plaintiff's representatives was becoming more and more tedious with each passing hour of this lengthy court session. As in the previous session, they branded Memorial as a "fifth column" acting in the interests of a hostile Poland. This brought back memories of the show trials of the 1930s when a "right-wing Trotskyite bloc" was exposed as spies working for several countries at the same time. Simply put, there was a definite feeling of déjà vu.
Defense lawyer Genri Reznik said that the representatives of the plaintiffs should apologize to the court for using the court as a forum to promote their marginal views that no serious historian can agree with rather than dealing with the substance of the case. The plaintiffs responded by demanding that the court order a review of the declassified Katyn documents given to the respondents and the plaintiffs by the State Archive of Social and Political History.
After both sides made their statements, a recess was announced pending the court's decision.
The hallway was packed with skinheads past their prime. (In any case their heads were shaved and their look was menacing. If they weren't skinheads, they were their forerunners). As in previous sessions, there were some miserable old women, Stalinists, who kept calling the respondents Masons and denouncing the current government. So Novaya Gazeta found itself for once on the same side of the barricades as the authorities. Happily it was not really a barricade but a simple barrier separating the people with some common sense from those who, for various reasons (including the actions of the authorities), have lost that faculty.
Two old women wore the Order of Lenin, which heraldry experts standing nearby immediately determined to be fakes. These old women wanted to show the court proof of their services, real or imagined, to the Stalinist cause.
However, there were also some people rooting for the respondents. When Yuri Mukhin, a representative of the plaintiff, came out of the courtroom, one of them called him a " fat Hitler". That seemed a bit extreme. But then I recalled that in his denunciations of Soviet and Russian leaders, including Putin (but excluding Stalin, of course) Mr Mukhin repeatedly quoted Hitler to support his case.
In the end, before the motley crowd that filled the courtroom, Judge Lopatkina dismissed the lawsuit filed by Ye.Ya. Jugashvili against Novaya Gazeta and Anatoly Yablokov and their demand to publish a rebuttal to Yablokov's statements (see above) in a special issue called "The Truth About the Gulag" and fined the respondents 10 million roubles as compensation for moral harm and suffering.
Yablokov's lawyer, A. Binetsky, expressed his surprise during the trial that such dedicated Stalinists were not above seeking lavish financial compensation for their ideas.
And yet this country needs a Nuremberg Trial in order to put an end to this cold civil war.
"There is now ample justification to claim that Stalin has been declared a criminal at the level of the Moscow District Court. From now on anyone is free to describe him as a ‘blood-thirsty cannibal'."
Oleg Khlebnikov