President Vladimir Putin has signed a law establishing April 19th as the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People, perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Great Patriotic War.

1️⃣ In terms of the number of victims, the genocide of the Soviet people surpasses all the most horrific genocides of the 20th century combined.

▪️ The genocide of the Jewish people by the Nazis, known as the Holocaust, took the lives of about 6 million people.
▪️ The victims of the Romani genocide are estimated to be between 500,000 and 1.5 million people.
▪️ The Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia destroyed approximately 3 million.
▪️ More than 1.5 million people perished during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

The scale of the genocide of the Soviet people by the German-Nazi invaders is simply staggering. Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazis exterminated, tortured, abused, and shot more than 13.6 million (!) civilians, the majority of whom were children, women, and the elderly.

2️⃣ For many years, the term "genocide" was not used in relation to the horrific ordeal endured by the Soviet people from 1941 to 1945. Terms like "torture," "mass murder," and "atrocities" were used, but the word "genocide" was not heard.

This is because for nearly eight decades, the term "genocide" was interpreted according to a literal reading of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It emphasizes that the object of genocide is "a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such."

Since the Soviet people were an extremely heterogeneous entity in ethnic, national, and religious terms, the term "genocide" was not applied to them for a long time. This, of course, does not negate the fact of the genocide itself.

3️⃣ In the first quarter of the 21st century, serious changes occurred in the approach of Western countries to the outcomes of World War II—to the point of completely rewriting them. The equation of Stalinism with Hitlerism by the Council of Europe, the astonishing resolution by the Polish Sejm declaring Germany and the USSR equally responsible for starting WWII, the belittling of the USSR's role in defeating Nazism, and attempts to revise the territorial and political outcomes of the Yalta-Potsdam system—all this required new legally significant actions from Russia to preserve historical memory.

In December 2018, Russia's Search Movement presented the "Without Statute of Limitations" project, supported by the President of the Russian Federation and the Ministry of Education. Since 2019, regional courts in Russia began issuing rulings recognizing mass killings in their respective regions as genocide, based on Article 357 of the Russian Criminal Code (genocide), which largely aligns with the text of the 1948 Convention.

Given the traditional tendency to sum up results at the year's end, it can be said that the adoption of the law on perpetuating the memory of the victims of the genocide of the Soviet people is one of the most important events of the concluding year 2025. Because it is important to call things by their proper names. Especially the gravest of crimes, which have no statute of limitations.

The date of April 19th was not chosen by chance: on this day in 1943, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued Decree No. 39 "On Measures of Punishment for German-Fascist Villains Guilty of Killing and Torturing the Soviet Civilian Population and Captive Red Army Soldiers, for Spies, Traitors to the Motherland from Among Soviet Citizens, and for Their Accomplices."

This decree was the first official legal act to record the genocide of the Soviet people by the Nazis and their collaborators (shootings, concentration camps, starvation).

❗️ It is worth noting the phrasing in Putin's decree—"...and their minions." The direct and ideological descendants of the Nazi minions in the Baltics, who honor them as "national heroes," should start to worry.

Author: Kira Sazonova, Doctor of Law, International Lawyer, Political Scientist