In what must rank as one of Russia’s strangest legal cases, a court began a libel hearing yesterday in defence of the reputation of Joseph Stalin.

Yevgeni Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s grandson, is taking part in a demand for ten million roubles (£200,000) in damages from Novaya Gazeta, a liberal opposition newspaper, over an article that accused the Soviet tyrant of personally approving executions.

The case is being brought by Leonid Zhura, a devoted Stalinist, who insists the dictator never actually killed anybody — despite the deaths of millions in purges and slave labour camps under his rule.

Hearings opened yesterday at Basmanny Court in Moscow into his complaint that Anatoli Yablokov, an historian, had insulted Stalin’s memory.

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Mr Yablokov wrote that the Soviet leader had signed orders to murder Soviet citizens, and that Stalin and the KGB were linked “by the gravest crimes, above all against their own people”. The newspaper reproduced documents from Soviet archives showing Stalin’s signature on lists of people for execution, some with handwritten notes insisting that all of the accused should be killed.

Mr Zhura, who runs a pro-Stalin website, claims that the signatures are forgeries. Mr Dzhugashvili, 73, said that he had come to Moscow from his home in Georgia, Stalin’s birthplace, to give evidence as a witness. He told The Times: “Of course I am happy the case has come to court, because I adore Stalin and bow down before his memory. I’m fighting all these bastards telling lies about him.”

Mr Dzhugashvili said that the massacre of thousands of Polish army officers at Katyn in 1940 — also the subject of Mr Yablokov’s article — was among the lies told about his grandfather. Despite the existence of a secret Soviet document showing that Stalin approved the slaughter, his grandson said: “They all accused Stalin, and our Government just swallowed the story.” Mr Zhura, 62, insists that Soviet apparatchiks, not Stalin himself,were to blame for mass killings during his rule. Mr Zhura accepts that Stalin created the Gulag prison system, but argues that only criminals were sent to the labour camps.

The case is being seen as another step in Kremlin-backed efforts to rehabilitate Stalin as a strong leader who turned the Soviet Union into a superpower. Vladimir Putin, during his time as President, endorsed a new school textbook describing Stalin as an “efficient manager” who behaved “entirely rationally, as the guardian of a system”.

Mr Dzhugashvili’s father, Yakov, was Stalin’s son by his first wife Yekaterina. Yakov was captured by the Nazis and died in a concentration camp in 1943, allegedly committing suicide after being told details of the Katyn massacre.

The libel case comes as a pro-Kremlin youth group is waging a campaign of intimidation against a former Soviet dissident in a dispute over a restaurant that changed its name from “AntiSoviet” to “Soviet”. The group, Nashi, began daily pickets outside the home of Alexander Podrabinek after he attacked a war veterans’ association for pressuring the restaurant to change its name.

Mr Podrabinek, who spent time in a labour camp in the 1970s for exposing Soviet misuse of psychiatry, is in hiding. This week President Medvedev’s human rights council denounced Nashi’s “persecution campaign”. But yesterday members of Mr Putin’s United Russia party backed Nashi, and called for the head of the rights council to be dismissed.

Rehabilitation

• An inscription praising Stalin reappeared in a mural in a Moscow metro station in 2008, 50 years after it had been removed

• In the same station, plaques featuring the city of Volgograd have been returned to their early Soviet name of Stalingrad

• A history book which claimed that Stalin acted rationally in killing millions was published last year to be used as a teaching guide in Russian schools

• In 2008 Stalin came third in a TV poll of the most popular Russian people of all time

• Billboards featuring Stalin’s image were put up round the city of Voronezh for a month in June, promoting his tough methods as the solution to the world economic crisis

• Lyrics from the Soviet anthem declaring: “Stalin raised us to be loyal to the nation, inspired us to labour and great deeds” carved in stone were recently restored to their original place in the hall of Kurskaya station in Moscow

Sources: Times database, BBC, Reuters

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