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The article tells tale of a fascinating libel lawsuit playing out in Moscow. The trial, which started Tuesday, pits Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin's grandson, against Russia's leading opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. Dzugashvili alleges that the newspaper libeled his grandfather by accusing Stalin of signing "death lists" and "committing crimes against [his] own people," in an article last April. He's suing for $300,000 in damages. Novaya Gazeta is standing by its article.
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Many Russians still view the Stalin years as a golden age, in which the USSR was transformed from a backward peasant nation into an industrial dynamo, defeated Nazi Germany, developed the A-bomb, and rose to become a global superpower. Others associate Stalin's rule with the horrors of collectivization, the gulag prison camps that swallowed up millions at their peak in the 1930s, mass executions by the Soviet secret police, catastrophic mistakes during World War II, and an authoritarian hangover that lingers in Russian political culture.
An early September poll released by the independent Levada Center in Moscow shows the public almost evenly divided on how to view the record of the man who iron-fistedly ruled the USSR for three decades, with 38 percent agreeing with the statement that Stalin was a "state criminal" and 44 percent disagreeing.
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"Public condemnation of Stalin is ceasing, while glorification of him is going full speed," says Ernst Cherny, secretary of the Committee in Defense of Scientists, a human rights group. "I fear [in this atmosphere] no one will even come to watch the trial at all."
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/09/15/russian-libel-ca…link=djemWLB
The article tells tale of a fascinating libel lawsuit playing out in Moscow. The trial, which started Tuesday, pits Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin's grandson, against Russia's leading opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. Dzugashvili alleges that the newspaper libeled his grandfather by accusing Stalin of signing "death lists" and "committing crimes against [his] own people," in an article last April. He's suing for $300,000 in damages. Novaya Gazeta is standing by its article.
...
Many Russians still view the Stalin years as a golden age, in which the USSR was transformed from a backward peasant nation into an industrial dynamo, defeated Nazi Germany, developed the A-bomb, and rose to become a global superpower. Others associate Stalin's rule with the horrors of collectivization, the gulag prison camps that swallowed up millions at their peak in the 1930s, mass executions by the Soviet secret police, catastrophic mistakes during World War II, and an authoritarian hangover that lingers in Russian political culture.
An early September poll released by the independent Levada Center in Moscow shows the public almost evenly divided on how to view the record of the man who iron-fistedly ruled the USSR for three decades, with 38 percent agreeing with the statement that Stalin was a "state criminal" and 44 percent disagreeing.
...
"Public condemnation of Stalin is ceasing, while glorification of him is going full speed," says Ernst Cherny, secretary of the Committee in Defense of Scientists, a human rights group. "I fear [in this atmosphere] no one will even come to watch the trial at all."
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/09/15/russian-libel-ca…link=djemWLB