A Russian court has dismissed a libel action brought against the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta by the grandson of Josef Stalin, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported.
Yevgeny Dzhugashvili had claimed that an article carried in a supplement of the newspaper on 22 April 2009 describing Stalin as a bloody dictator personally responsible for the execution of Soviet citizens and thousands of Polish officers killed at Katyn in 1940, had “damaged the honour and dignity” of his grandfather.
Hailing the ruling by the court in Basmanny, Moscow, Wednesday rejecting the complaint against Novaya Gazeta, Paris-based RSF said, “This is a victory for common sense. Any other decision, outlawing the debate on Stalin’s record, would have constituted a serious setback for freedom of expression and a very worrying sign of the political climate in Russia”.
A spokesman for the newspaper, Nadezhda Prusenkova, voiced her satisfaction with the outcome as a “first victory”. “The Basmanny district court was probably not in a position to launch a major social debate on Stalinism ; access to military archives that we called for to assess historical facts was denied. But this decision brings up in their tracks those nostalgic for Stalin who hoped to make use of this trial as a grandstand and to attempt to rehabilitate the dictator”, she said.
In an unrelated case, the newspaper has still not received any official notification of another libel suit against it that was announced on October 6 by Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov.
