Moscow court resumes hearings in Stalin’s grandson’s libel case against newspaper

Moscow court hears Stalin’s grandson’s libel case

MOSCOW — A Moscow court resumed hearings Tuesday in a libel suit brought by Stalin’s grandson against a Russian newspaper he accuses of questioning the Soviet dictator’s honor and dignity.

Yevgeny Dzhugashvili has contested a report in Novaya Gazeta that Josef Stalin personally signed execution orders for thousands of Soviet and foreign citizens. The April 22 article was based on recently declassified Soviet documents.

The plaintiff, who was not present at Tuesday’s hearing, has demanded monetary compensation from the newspaper and the author of the article, Anatoly Yablokov.

Ten elderly Stalin supporters gathered outside the courtroom holding photographs of the dictator.

“I’ve come here to defend Stalin, to defend him against these terrible accusations,” said Vera Atomanova, 77. “He was a great man. He united the country and created a great superpower.”

She and the others were reading the hardline communist newspaper Molniya, whose main headline said: “The myth of Stalinist repressions.”

Recent years have seen an escalation in efforts to rehabilitate the dictator who, according to the rights group Memorial, ordered the deaths of at least 724,000 citizens during a series of purges that peaked in the late 1930s.

Stalin is perhaps most revered for leading the Soviet Union to victory in World War II.

Earlier this year, he was voted the third-greatest Russian of all time in a television poll. A plaque bearing Stalin’s name that decades ago vanished from the vestibule of a Moscow metro station was recently restored. And former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev last year denounced efforts to portray Stalin as a “brilliant manager” rather than a murderous autocrat.