He wouldn’t have done that.
A Moscow court on Tuesday sentenced liberal politician Leonid Gozman, 72, to 15 days in prison. Gozman has long belonged to one of the sharpest critics of Putin; he left Russia when the Russian military invaded Ukraine but returned in June in what he described as “a moral choice”.
The verdict relates to a text that Gozman wrote on Facebook in 2020, in which he took offense at a new law banning comparisons to Nazi Germany’s Hitler and the Soviet Union’s Stalin:
“It is wrong to equate the two – Hitler was absolute evil and Stalin even worse.”
The Tverskoy District Court in Moscow found that Gozman violated the law. He has also been declared a “foreign agent”, which means close scrutiny of his activities by authorities.
Ruthless dictator Josef Stalin led the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1953. His legacy was smeared by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, who, among other things, called Stalin’s time in power a reign of terror in a 1956 speech.