Posted on 09/01/2009 2:44:04 AM PDT by Loyalist
MOSCOW–Joseph Stalin was in the dock yesterday when a Russian court held a preliminary hearing in a libel case brought by his grandson over a newspaper story that said the tyrant had ordered the killings of Soviet citizens.
Rights groups say the case shows a creeping attempt in modern Russia to paint a more benevolent picture of the Soviet Union's most feared leader, under whose rule millions perished.
Stalin's grandson, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, is seeking 9.5 million rubles ($327,000) from the Novaya Gazeta newspaper and 500,000 rubles ($17,225) from the author of an article published last April claiming Stalin personally signed death orders.
Leonid Zhura, a convinced Stalinist who is representing Dzhugashvili in court, said the article, based on declassified Kremlin documents, damaged Stalin's reputation.
(Excerpt) Read more at thestar.ca ...
Impossible. It's like libeling the Devil.
Interesting, though, in that we may be seeing a show trial here like the old show trials, the purpose of which wasn't justice or anything like justice, but to make words come out of defendants' mouths that the whole world knew were untrue, in order to demonstrate Stalin's power even over the public words of his victims.
If the trial is to be a power demo, then it is, precisely, a show trial and should be treated as such.
And Putin should be treated as such. No more mollycoddling. No more eye-gazing. Suck it up, everybody, it's Cold War II already.
Shouldn't he be suing those mean old facts? Not the man transcribing them?
They were about mounting a political spectacle of making palpable lies come out of someone's mouth -- and then shooting him -- to demonstrate the evil power of the dictator.
They were all show, no trial. They were exactly analogous to Haitian dictator Henri Cristophe's practice of marching a company of his troops off the parapet of his massive clifftop fortress to their deaths, just to impress Europeans.
Hey even Whoopie Goldberg says that Stalin was merely misunderstood.
He should be able to get “experts” from the NY Times to help him out.
The 0bama administration goes after the CIA that served under G W Bush.
There was a lot of negativity toward Bush by the media. Does this mean that one day the grand kids of G W will sue the media for slander/libel?
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