Vladimir Putin's Russia has coined a new word: "derehabilitation." The closure of the Gulag History Museum in Moscow on November 14, and the removal, announced on December 3, of the Solovetsky Stone "in memory of the millions of victims of the Soviet totalitarian regime" from Lubyanka Square, the historic headquarters of the KGB in the heart of the capital, have confirmed what the Russian prosecutors' office has been slowly accomplishing over the past two years: Since the second half of 2022, it has examined some 14,000 cases of the rehabilitation of victims of Soviet repression and canceled more than 4,000 of them.

The declared aim is to "derehabilitate" people guilty of serious crimes. Officially, they are Russians suspected of collaborating with Hitler's regime during the Second World War. "Nazis and traitors to the fatherland," the same terms used by the Kremlin in almost three years of special military operations to describe Ukrainians and, in Russia, opponents.

Adopted following the collapse of the USSR, the 1991 law on the rehabilitation of victims of Soviet repression already excluded those guilty of crimes of collaboration with the Nazi regime. The selective cancellations of the last two years were therefore not necessary a priori. But they are part of the Kremlin's discourse to rewrite history and justify its special military operation in Ukraine against the Nazis of Kyiv and, in Russia, the repression against an alleged fifth column deemed liberal and revisionist. On television screens and in school playgrounds, the message orchestrated by the propaganda is clear: As under Stalin, President Putin is fighting Nazism, and those who oppose him are "fascists."

"It's a process of forgetting and distortion to repress the memory of the repressions. The attack on the Rehabilitation Act, the only legal text in which the state acknowledged its responsibility for political terror, is part of the Putin ideology that seeks to minimize this responsibility. It's based on a return to a mythical, supposedly glorious, past that has in fact never existed," said Irina Scherbakowa, a historian working with the Memorial organization, now in exile.

Founded by former dissidents, the Russian NGO was one of the few to carry out memory work on the Soviet past. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, it has been banned in Russia and much of its work is now undone by these rehabilitation cancellations. Memorial has asked for a list of the 4,000 "derehabilitated." "These will undoubtedly be those who took part in the resistance against Soviet rule, including members of the armed resistance in Lithuania and Western Ukraine," said Scherbakowa. The Kremlin's current policy gives rise to another fear: "We're losing access to the archives." If rehabilitation is canceled, investigation files automatically become inaccessible.

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