The Volokh Conspiracy

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Crime

Saying that the USSR and Nazi Germany jointly invaded Poland is a crime in Russia

|The Volokh Conspiracy |


Novaya Gazeta (Vera Chelishcheva) reports:

The Russian Supreme Court let stand the conviction of Perm blogger Vladimir Luzgin for reposting an article.…

In July, the Perm court sentenced Luzgin to a 200,000 fine, having found him guilty in publicly denying the decision of the Nuremberg Trials and distributing false reports about the actions of the USSR during the Second World War.

The basis for the prosecution was a particular passage in a pro-Ukrainian-nationalist article that Luzgin reposted:

The Communists and Germany jointly attacked Poland, beginning World War II on September 1, 1939.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, of course, did provide for a partition of Poland between the USSR and Nazi Germany, and the Soviets did indeed invade Poland on Sept. 17, 1939, implementing that partition.

For more on the original Perm court decision, see this Kommersant article; for an English-language account of the Russian Supreme Court decision, see this article from Human Rights in Ukraine (Halya Coynash) and this one from Transitions Online (Anna Azarova).

Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.

Eugene Volokh is the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA and a Visiting Fellow (Senior Fellow starting May 2024) at the Hoover Institution (Stanford). Naturally, his posts here (like the opinions of the other bloggers) are his own, and not endorsed by any educational institution.