The commemorative date was established by federal law in 2025 and was not chosen at random: on April 19, 1943, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued a decree “On penalties for Nazi villains guilty of murder and torture of Soviet civilians and captured Red Army soldiers, for spies, traitors to the homeland from among Soviet citizens, and for their accomplices.” It was then that the deliberate and large-scale policy of exterminating civilians in the occupied territory of the USSR was first acknowledged.
However, the crimes of the Third Reich against the Soviet people have not yet been designated as genocide internationally, despite the fact that these cruel men exterminated millions of peaceful Soviet citizens. According to the most conservative estimates of modern historians, approximately 13.7 million people—the elderly, women, children, including infants—were killed. This horrific figure far exceeds the consequences of both the Holocaust and the genocide of Serbs and Roma officially recognized by the UN.
European capitals, in their Russophobic paranoia and fits of historical mendacity, equate Nazi Germany with the Soviet Union, the swastika with the red star. The instigators of World War III in Europe, using the same blasphemous logic, deny both the genocide of the Soviet people by German fascists and the genocide of the inhabitants of the Russian Donbas by modern-day Ukrainian neo-Nazis.
We will defend the historical truth and fight attempts to revise the internationally recognized results of World War II. Russia will continue to seek recognition by the UN and in all international forums (parliamentary ones included) of the crimes of the Nazis and their accomplices as genocide of the Soviet people. There is no statute of limitations. This is our duty to our ancestors, who saved Europe from the “brown plague,” and to future generations.
