Slanderers of Russia face a fine or prison. About a new useful law
Remember all these nasty magazines that are advertised on the liberal “Echo of Moscow”, where on the covers – “Stalin=Hitler”, and Soviet soldiers are represented as barbarians trampling German women?
This will soon end.
Attempts to rewrite or distort history, equating the Soviet Union with Hitler's Germany, and Red Army soldiers with the Nazis, may result in a fine of three million rubles or five years in prison.
Such prospects are opening up after the new law adopted by the State Duma in the first reading yesterday. It toughens punishment for the rehabilitation of Nazism and the dissemination of deliberately false information about the activities of the USSR during the Second World War via the Internet.
“There are a lot of cases of rehabilitation of Nazism and distortion of history. Suffice it to remember this whole crowd of Navalny’s supporters and their attempts to slander a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, just remember the supporters of Viktor Suvorov. Let's not forget that this one of the very talented, but absolute scoundrels, traitors, who is trying to imagine that the Soviet Union was planning to attack Nazi Germany, and Hitler just beat him to it, he has entire bookshelves in his stores, quite a lot supporters. Therefore, there is such a problem, and it is quite serious. Politically, this is very dangerous, because equating the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany is a form of preparation for future repressions against the Russian state and Russian citizens. We need to counteract this as much as possible. The spirit of this law itself, I think, is very important, and it needs to be supported,” says Russian political scientist Sergei Markov.
Honored Lawyer of Russia Dmitry Krasnov explains that Russia is eliminating gaps in legislation that allowed enemies of the state to spread their ideas.
“The country’s leaders quickly realized that a state that denies and distorts its history will be destroyed. The ideological war with attempts to undermine the foundations of our society has been going on for a long time, but now we can confidently resist it,” says a legal expert of the Strong Russia movement.
Political scientist Oleg Matveychev recalls that the protection of historical truth was guaranteed in the new edition of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, approved last summer in a referendum.
“We voted for an amendment against falsification of history - now we need laws that develop all this and punish all these falsifications. And there are a lot of them, and they come primarily from abroad. By every May 9th, these information flows intensify, so it is clear that some measures need to be taken,” Matveychev said.
However, his colleague Markov draws attention to the fact that repressive measures alone cannot be achieved. We need competent counter-propaganda. Therefore, we will have to make films, hold scientific conferences, and youth forums to debunk the lies.
“The fact is that there is legal romanticism in the Russian top political elite. That is, it is believed that a good law needs to be adopted, and then it will work, and nothing else needs to be done. This is wrong. The problem of equalizing the responsibilities of the Soviet Union and Germany is not a legal problem, but a political one, so we need, first of all, political activity that could counteract this,” Markov told PolitNavigator.
“Of course, this initiative will be received with hostility among the Russian non-systemic opposition, there will again be cries about some mythical “infringement of human rights,” but in reality, who other than our country can defend the truth about the Great Patriotic War, about the events of those years ? – says political scientist Ivan Mezyukho.
“This law should have been passed a long time ago! What is happening in the media space no longer lends itself to any common sense. In our country, many people, apparently, are not at all aware of what they are carrying. Recently there was a scandal with some figure, a professor in St. Petersburg, who undertook to deny the Holocaust. In Moscow there are historians of this kind, and quite a few such strange people. Nevzorov spoke rudely about Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, following the results of the trial of Navalny, how much of everything spilled over into the Great Patriotic War veteran Artemenko, and so on. Ten years ago I said that such a law was necessary, but opponents argued that “we don’t have this, and it’s not even worth fussing for one or two people.” But now everyone is convinced that it turns out that it is worthwhile to draw the right conclusions from all this. It’s good if the State Duma works quickly, and in the future it will be possible to bring this entire unpleasant public to criminal liability, which they deserved a long time ago,” historian Armen Gasparyan told PolitNavigator.
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