A month ago, the regional court of Perm Krai convicted Vladimir Luzgin, for the first time in provincial practice, according to Article 354.1 \u2018Rehabilitation of Nazism\u2019 of the Criminal Code, Part One\u2014\u2018public denial of facts identified by the sentence of the International Military Tribunal for judgement and punishment of the main military criminals of the European states of the Axis, public condoning of the crimes identified by above-noted sentence, as well as dissemination of knowingly false fabrications about the activity of the Soviet Union in the years of World War II\u2019<\/em>,\u00a0 that was enacted in a hurry two years ago.\u00a0 The \u2018criminal\u2019 was sentenced to a fine of 200 thousand roubles, that is not too bad, as the maximum punishment in that part is three years of imprisonment.\u00a0 A criminal case was opened after Luzgin shared in VKontakte social network a link to a propagandistic article of an unknown author, \u2018Fifteen Facts about Banderites, or What Kremlin Keeps Silent about\u2019.\u00a0 As the investigation showed, a huge number of people could read that article by Luzgin\u2019s link\u2014as much as\u2026 twenty persons.<\/p>\n

What can I say about it?\u00a0 The text of the article can easily be found in the Internet, and it\u2019s certainly nothing but rubbish.\u00a0 The author tries to varnish reputation of Stepan Bandera, the infamous leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists during the Second World War, but without any success, as Bandera\u2019s hands are coated with too much innocent blood.\u00a0 The author also doesn\u2019t know history well, otherwise he wouldn\u2019t have written that \u2018communists and Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and thus set off the Second World War\u2019.\u00a0 As I can understand, it was this phrase that our prosecutors were so angry about.\u00a0 I can also imagine that a person who shares a link to such a material in a social network is not well-educated either.<\/p>\n

What I can\u2019t understand at all, however, is what does this have to do with the Criminal Code.\u00a0 Especially as the Soviet Union did invade Poland, although not on 1 September, but \u2018only\u2019 on 17 September 1939, and did it in accordance to the secret protocol to the German\u2013Soviet non-aggression pact of 23 August.\u00a0 This fact, of course, was not under consideration at the Nuremberg trials, and we know why.<\/p>\n

Of course the case of Luzgin is a purely political process, one could expect something worse in the \u2018post-Crimean\u2019 period.\u00a0 Of course it wasn\u2019t an attempt to establish any kind of censorship.\u00a0 Nevertheless, this story means that full-aged citizens of this country, if they don\u2019t know history well enough, have now a good chance to get not just a bad mark, but a criminal sentence.\u00a0 Especially if the issue is the Second World War.\u00a0 Learn your lessons properly, guys\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A month ago, the regional court of Perm Krai convicted Vladimir Luzgin, for the first time in provincial practice, according to Article 354.1 \u2018Rehabilitation of Nazism\u2019 of the Criminal Code, Part One\u2014\u2018public denial of facts identified by the sentence of the International Military Tribunal for judgement and punishment of the main military criminals of the …<\/p>\n

\u0427\u0438\u0442\u0430\u0442\u044c \u0434\u0430\u043b\u044c\u0448\u0435 \u2018200.000 Roubles as a Fine for a Bad Knowledge of History\u2019 \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[839,362],"tags":[483],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p20QQs-Lw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael-mints.ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2946"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael-mints.ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael-mints.ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael-mints.ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael-mints.ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michael-mints.ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2946\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael-mints.ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael-mints.ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael-mints.ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}