The Ukraine’s general prosecutor is bringing charges against Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his secret police (NKVD) chief Lavrenti Beria, for crimes against the Ukrainian people 70 years ago.
“The Soviet Union deported thousands of people from Crimea to Siberia and Central Asia. The deportations followed the Soviet decision in 1944 to regard thousands of Turkic-speaking, Muslim citizens in what was then part of the Soviet federation as enemies of the state. The Ukrainian state estimates that at least 230,000 people were deported, the majority of whom were Tatar, with some who were Greek and Bulgarian. Thousands perished in the hardships,” reported Newsweek.
Stalin is estimated to have killed over 20 million Soviet citizens in various republics. The starvation of Ukraine, the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, is one of history’s great tragedies. The Ukrainian parliament has regarded Stalin’s actions in Ukraine as genocide since 2006.
While Stalin is growing in popularity in Russia, Ukraine has destroyed hundreds of Soviet monuments in a ‘decommunization’ of the country.
“To bring the prosecution, Ukraine’s investigators carried out 53 probes across 52 universities and 67 state libraries, documenting evidence against Stalin and Beria. The prosecutor has also reviewed archives of the mass starvation of ethnic Ukrainians during 1932 and 1933, known as the Holodomor,” again reported Newsweek.
