In the Western Siberian city of Nizhnevartovsk, police have detained local resident Alexander Korolev for a social media post he had published in 2017. The detainee reported as much to OVD-Info.
In the offending post, Korolev drew parallels between the political regimes of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. He is being charged with equating the actions of the USSR and Nazi Germany (under Art. 13.48 of the Code of Administrative Offenses, Part 1). Police arrested Korolev as he was leaving work and took him to the precinct.
The State Duma passed the law against the public equation of the roles of the USSR and Nazi Germany, making it an administrative offense punishable by fines, in April 2022. A fine of $17-33 can be replaced with 15 days of administrative arrest.
Late in August, police arrested opposition politician Leonid Gozman on the same charges for his post in which he wrote that “Hitler is an absolute evil, but Stalin is even worse.” According to the politician, the NKVD (Soviet secret police) was worse than the SS “because chekists killed their own”. In mid-September, he was arrested again, this time for a 2013 post in which he compared the SMERSH (Soviet military counterintelligence) also with SS units.