The unfinished rehabilitation of victims of 1930s repressions in Belarus (example of peasants from Miensk district)

The process of rehabilitation of victims of Stalinist political repressions was prolonged, but still is unfinished. The latest national laws (created in early 1990s) list categories of victims according to different articles of the Criminal Code of the Belarusian SSR (1928). Yet, legislators failed to name many categories. The author examines five examples of the articles of the Criminal Code of the Belarusian SSR which were used for political persecution of Belarusian citizens in 1930s. They are: article 103 (agitation and propaganda against the order of state administration), article 118 (flight from the place of compulsory settlement), article 120-1 (infringement of the passport regime and the rules of registration), article 131 (arbitrariness), article 152 (infringement of laws, resolutions and rules regulating trade and industry). None of these articles belonged to the part of the Criminal Code regulating so-called "counter-revolutionary crimes" (deeds clearly marked as political crimes). There is an obvious need to carry out wider rehabilitation of political convicts than the one which took place in 1990s