The BBC reports:
The paper published a piece referring to declassified death warrants which it says bore Stalin’s personal signature.Mr Dzhugashvili — who was not at the court as the case was brought on Thursday — says that is a lie, and that Stalin never directly ordered the deaths of anyone.
It is the latest bizarre twist in what many see as a Kremlin-backed campaign to rehabilitate Stalin’s reputation, says the BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Moscow.
Categories: Uncategorized
David Newton says:
Stalin is dead. Stalin was one of the worst mass-murderers in history. It is impossible to defame someone who is dead (or at least it should be impossible in any decent legal jurisdiction).
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October 9, 2009, 3:02 amKazinski says:
That is one thing that hasn’t changed much since Stalin’s day, the courts in Russia seem unusually sensitive to the government’s preferred outcome. Unlike here where the courts often seem unduly gleeful at sticking a finger in the government’s eye.
It won’t matter much, Stalin’s reputation didn’t really hinge on whether he personally signed any death warrants. Just like it doesn’t matter, other than as an artifact, whether Hitler, Mao, or Pol Pot personally signed any death warrants, they were responsible for their regimes crimes, regardless of how many layers of bureaucrats were between them and the actual executioners.
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October 9, 2009, 3:33 amNathanM says:
Decent is not synonymous with common law. I know it’s our rule, but there’s nothing inherently indecent about protecting the reputations of dead people who are not mass-murderers.
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October 9, 2009, 3:57 amJ. Aldridge says:
Well I guess if they can rehabilitate Stalin’s reputation, they can also Hitler’s.
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October 9, 2009, 4:13 amMark N. says:
And it’s our rule only as regards civil acts. A number of US states retain a criminal “defamation of the dead” statute that at least in theory could be applied in situations severe and infamous enough to attract attention of the public prosecutor. This (PDF) piece arguing against the notion of criminal libel altogether lists ten U.S. states with such statutes: Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, and Washington. It gives the citations as: Colo. Rev. Stat. § 18–13-105 (2000); O.C.G.A. § 16–11-40 (2000); Idaho Code § 18–4801 (2000); Kan. Stat. Ann. § 21–4004 (2000); La. Rev. Stat. § 14:47(2) (2001); Nev. Rev. Stat. § 200.510 (2001); N.D. Cent. Code § 12.1–15-01 (2001); 21 Okla. Stat. § 771 (2000); Utah Code Ann. § 76–9-501 (2001); Wash. Rev. Code Ann. § 9.58.010 (2001).
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October 9, 2009, 4:29 amLeo Marvin says:
Unfortunately there are a lot of Russians for whom Stalin’s reputation needs no rehabilitating.
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October 9, 2009, 5:00 amneurodoc says:
All the “people in the street” applauding this preposterous lawsuit to be elderly who would like to return to the great days of yore when Russia was a superpower and almost everyone was poor. I wonder if this were to happen say twenty years from now, when there be few still alive who had reached their maturity before Stalin died (was murdered?), who would show up then. Will the “cult of Stalin,” whatever it may be now, outlast these fossils? Will there be believers in successive generations? Could Stalin inspire more than a rare few neo-Stalinists years after his death in the manner that Hitler continues to “inspire” neo-Nazis
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October 9, 2009, 5:45 amSarcastro says:
Hitler by the fourth comment! It really is awful what the internet has come to, when one can’t go posting about Stalin without someone making a Nazi!!! Ref.
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October 9, 2009, 7:37 amCedric says:
I don’t know what is worse: seeing Godwin’s law unfold or someone trolling about the fact that this is happening...
Ontopic: I found this video rather illustrative about the whole uptrend of Stalin in Moscow.
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October 9, 2009, 7:47 amFedya says:
[sticks fingers in ears and starts screaming]
Pinochet! Pinochet! Pinochet!
[removes fingers from ears]
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October 9, 2009, 8:36 amMartinned says:
Why does this guy have standing to sue? What damage has he personally suffered? As far as I can tell, that is the reason why defamation of the dead isn’t generally possible, because the dead can’t sue and the living have suffered no damage.
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October 9, 2009, 9:14 amegd says:
I’m confused by the lawsuit.
Was Stalin’s reputation really so great that he is damaged by the appearance of his signature on death warrants?
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October 9, 2009, 10:50 amAssistant Village Idiot says:
egd, they are trying to show that it wasn’t execution execution.
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October 9, 2009, 11:55 amkrs says:
Martinned, I’m not familiar with Russian law. Are you?
It’s not farfetched to suppose that another country might allow someone’s direct descendant to sue for defamation of the decedent. He’s not a pure bystander, he is affected in some way by his grandfather’s reputation, and injury to “family honor” is something some societies care about.
If Russian courts were bound by Lujan, that would be different...
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October 9, 2009, 12:14 pmMartinned says:
@krs: It’s not just a Lujan thing. It’s a general principle of law in every legal order that I know, that in some sense the plaintiff has to have a material interest in the proceedings. They have to be better off somehow if their request is granted.
I’d say that sueing over “family honour” is a different matter: If you translate that into legalese, the claim is that a (defamatory) statement made about a third party is hurting the plaintiff’s reputation. Judging from the BBC article linked, that’s not what this guy is doing. He seems to be claiming simply to vindicate his grandfather’s reputation, not his own. (His name is Dzhugashvili, so not that many people would even know about his connection to Stalin, unless he told them.)
In that circumstance, how can he show damage? How does the defendant’s alleged defamatory statement adversely affect him, as opposed to the late Stalin himself? If this guy can sue over Stalin’s reputation, does that mean that I can sue to protect Lenin’s reputation?
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October 9, 2009, 12:22 pmCJColucci says:
I think we’ve pretty well covered that if Stalin’s grandson sued in an American court under American law, he’d lose, and that we Americans like that rule. Does anyone know anything about Russian libel law? That might actually get us somewhere.
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October 9, 2009, 12:51 pmKirk Parker says:
Martinned,
If countless people here in the USA, many if not most of them not of Slavic origin, know that Dzhugashvili is Stalin’s family name, what are the chances of the average Russian-in-the-street not knowing that?
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October 9, 2009, 2:18 pmMartinned says:
I tend to measure such things by myself. Since I even know what Buys Ballot’s law is, I tend to assume that any random trivia that I don’t know will be unknown to the vast majority of the human population. I did know that Stalin was only his nickname, and I also knew that he was from Georgia, but I had to copy/paste his real name from the BBC story.
For the US, though, I’m pretty sure that “countless” would be an overstatement. One would hope that “countless” people in the US would know who Stalin was, but even that’s not entirely certain. (That’s not a complaint about the US. I find that in most places people don’t know the most basic factoids.)
Anyway, to the extent that he can prove that an incorrect statement of fact about person X is causing more than de minimis damage to his reputation and/or livelihood, I’d be OK with the court entertaining the suit, no matter who person X is. (NYT v Sullivan issues aside.) It’s not defamation, but it could very well be an unlawful act in the normal civil law approach to tort liability.
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October 9, 2009, 2:43 pmguy in the veal calf office says:
Jonathan Brent has a lot more on the rehabilitation of that mass murderer.
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October 9, 2009, 2:56 pmneurodoc says:
Thanks for the link, which helped answer my questions above about who could possibly think of Stalin in a positive light. It seems that it is not just some elderly nostalgic for the time when Russia was a superpower, notwithstanding how oppressive the government and failed the economy, but many more then that particular demographic slice. Amazing and dismaying that this should be so.
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October 9, 2009, 6:40 pmPintler says:
FWIW, I knew, and I don’t think I have ever even read a biography of Stalin. I suspect Russians know who his ancestors are like Americans know who Jackie O’s first husband was.
(Speaking of Mr. Dzhugashvili brought to mind other famous WWII dictators who changed names, and I googled Shickelgruber to check the spelling, only to find out that the google consensus is that Hitler was never named Shickelgruber (or whatever, the spelling seems to vary). His father was, but changed his name before Adolf was born. Another dinner table conversation tidbit bites the dust!)
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October 9, 2009, 8:16 pmSoronel Haetir says:
Isn’t a lot of this at the behest of the Russian government itself, for whatever nationalist reason(s) they might have?
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October 9, 2009, 10:03 pmneurodoc says:
From that link provided by guy in the veal calf office:
The government may be a major contributor, but those figures are surprising and disturbing to me, since it seems to be that admiration for Stalin isn’t limited to some elderly Russians.
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October 9, 2009, 11:32 pmJ. Otto Pohl says:
The rehabilitation of Stalin is also happening in Central Asia and not just among old people. Some 61% of youth in Kyrgyzstan aged 20–35, 53% in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and 35% in Russia have a positive view of Stalin according to a recent survey. Civil trials are actually not as worrisome as the current use of criminal law to supress academic research into Stalin era crimes. The Russian government is now bringing criminal charges against Professor Mikhail Spurun of Pomorsky State University for his work on Stalinist repression. I have a couple of posts on my blog about the situtation regarding Spurun.
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October 10, 2009, 4:04 amJ. Otto Pohl says:
OOps, for some reason the link gave the wrong website. My blog is at
http://jpohl.blogspot.com
I do not know why that happened.
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October 10, 2009, 4:07 amallrise says:
They took this case into the people’s court — Enter AllRise Court http://bit.ly/AllRise2644 , to see what the people think
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October 11, 2009, 8:08 amOctober 14 roundup says:
[...] Stalin’s grandson loses lawsuit in Russia against newspaper that supposedly defamed the dictator [WSJ Law Blog, Lowering the Bar, Volokh] [...]
TeefeWitteJap says:
Можно и поспорить по этому вопросу, ведь только в споре может родиться истина.
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October 24, 2009, 3:53 pmRoberto says:
This is an age old battle we her ein America now feel people that are hanging on to stalin days of yore are simply hanging onto the “Security although be it repressed they felt safe with his ways now thats he’s gone and gov’t is full of Perceived Chaos people cry for Safety and to Normalize their lives and tend to forget the suffering from the past”
We In America are doin much the same thing to ourselves Giving up basic freedoms for a little Perceived Security. We now live in a country of Fear Brought about by the events of September 11th. Now we want the Gov’t to spy on potential Terrorists regardless of the cost regardless of the “Interpretation” of Terrorist. For abhorrant fear that something like that may happen again or worse god forbid.
Americans would be good to remember what Ben Franklin said “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”
That is all that the upsurgence of Stalinizm is Security even at the cost of Liberty
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November 7, 2009, 1:40 pm