by Elena Kuleshova
[REGNUM] The Great Patriotic War left scars not only on people and in history, but also in human memory. For a long time, it was believed that the figure from school textbooks "twenty million dead" was military losses and "collateral damage".
Over time, our understanding of history has become deeper and it has become clear that those millions of women, children, old people, and teenagers destroyed by the Nazis were not just “losses among the civilian population,” but the result of a planned, deliberate genocide of the Soviet people.
It took quite a long time to reach this understanding: seven years ago, the Russian Search Movement initiated the all-Russian project “No Statute of Limitations”. It was first presented in December 2018 at a meeting of the Russian Organizing Committee “Victory”.
The stated goal of the project was to preserve the historical memory of the tragedy of the civilian population of the USSR - victims of war crimes by the Nazis and their accomplices during the Great Patriotic War.
The initiative was supported by over 2 million people, and additional work to find evidence of Nazi atrocities was carried out throughout the country by dozens of local history organizations and hundreds of activists.
In 2025, having summarized the data received, a group of deputies and senators - 20 people in total - submitted to the State Duma Committee on Labor, Social Policy and Veterans' Affairs a bill "On perpetuating the memory of the victims of the genocide of the Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945."
On April 9, it was sent to the Federation Council for consideration and adopted a week later. On April 21, 2025, the bill was signed by the President of the Russian Federation and acquired the status of a valid law.
The main thing it defines is the concept of "genocide of the Soviet people". It is recognized as "the actions of the Nazis and their accomplices during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, aimed at the complete or partial destruction of national, ethnic and racial groups inhabiting the territory of the USSR, by: killing members of these groups; causing serious harm to their health; forcibly preventing childbirth; forced transfer of children; forced resettlement or other creation of living conditions calculated to physically destroy members of these groups."
In addition, the law defines the forms of perpetuating the memory of victims, the procedure for reburial of their remains, ensuring the safety of burials or unburied remains, and regulates issues of organizing and conducting search work.
The powers of Russian state authorities and local governments working to perpetuate the memory of the victims of the genocide of the Soviet people are also delineated.
Now it has ceased to be simply a statement of fact and is the focus of attention of investigative bodies.
"To date, 19 court decisions have already been made recognizing the crimes of the Nazis and their allies against the peaceful Soviet population as genocide, as a result of which about 4 million civilians suffered. The trials will continue," the authors of the bill claim.
Even after 80 years, activists are finding previously unknown places of mass executions and archival documents confirming the atrocities of the occupiers.
There is a lot of work to be done, because even the register of existing monuments to those killed during the Great Patriotic War is still in the process of being created, although it already includes data from 24 regions.
For example, it included the Zhestyanaya Gorka memorial complex in the Novgorod region. Here, in a concentration camp near the village of the same name, about 3,000 people died in 1942–1943, including children aged 5 to 17. An examination established that children were shot in the back of the head, chopped with knives, stabbed with bayonets, and beaten to death with sticks.
Based on these facts, a criminal case was opened under Article 357 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation “Genocide”.
Journalist and member of the Human Rights Council Alexander Malkevich told the Regnum news agency that he ardently supports the innovations introduced by the law.
"To be honest, I am surprised that it took so long to get around to eliminating this monstrous injustice. We are only just beginning to guess, especially young and middle-aged people, how many civilians died as a result of genocide. I am a native Leningrader myself and I know, unfortunately, that traces of these monstrous Nazi crimes are still being found in the Leningrad Region. At one time I lived and worked in the Novgorod Region, and unfortunately there is a lot of work there too," says Malkevich.
According to him, it is necessary to collect together all the historical evidence of Nazi crimes, including in the new territories of Russia.
"I hope that there will be strong-willed people who will create a museum entirely dedicated to the history of the fascist genocide, where everything will be shown using interactive technologies: the authentic setting of the concentration camp, and the torture chambers from the dungeons in Rovenki. I have been to Austria and to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where General Karbyshev was tortured. And all this also needs to be shown. To make it so that people literally feel with their skin what ordinary, peaceful people of our country went through during the war with Nazi Germany," our interlocutor is sure.
And now search teams and associations engaged in the search and burial of the remains of the dead will be involved in collecting evidence. For this purpose, their activities are additionally regulated.
Previously, search teams who discovered the burial sites of civilians could be brought to court under Article 244 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, "Desecration of the bodies of the dead and their burial sites." While the exhumation of the remains of soldiers and officers of the Red Army is regulated by the Law of the Russian Federation of January 14, 1993, No. 4292-1, "On the perpetuation of the memory of those killed in defense of the Fatherland," the work of search teams in this area is legal and honorable.
The law resolves these contradictions by establishing a procedure for coordinating and conducting search operations in relation to the remains of the civilian population. In addition, searchers have the right to initiate a temporary ban on construction, excavation, road and other work if they are carried out at the site of such a burial.
"Over the 37 years of the search expedition's work in the Novgorod region, we have repeatedly found joint burials of Red Army soldiers and civilians and did not divide them - we buried them together. And according to the new bill, if we find civilians who died during the Great Patriotic War, we stop the search work and hand the case over to investigators of the Investigative Committee, who add these cases to the general case of the genocide of the Soviet people," explains Igor Neofitov, Chairman of the Council of Commanders of the "Dolina" search expedition in the Novgorod region, to Regnum News Agency.
And the searchers have quite a few such finds. Neofitov told, for example, how during the retreat of the Red Army in one of the Novgorod villages they did not have time to evacuate a hospital and the Germans shot over 300 wounded soldiers and officers.
Along with them, 209 local residents were shot, in whose houses hospital wards were set up. In the "cauldron" into which the 2nd Shock Army found itself in 1942, there were not only military units, but also over a hundred villages and farmsteads, the majority of whose population perished.
In the Partisan Territory, a vast forested area in the Leningrad, Novgorod, Pskov and Tver regions, behind German lines, it was difficult to separate partisans from civilians – everyone, young and old, took part in the popular resistance. It was here, about two years ago, that searchers discovered a dugout containing the remains of two adults and nine children – the Nazis shot them on the spot for “aiding the partisans.”
And this is only the Novgorod region. Taking into account that there are more than 1,500 search teams operating in Russia, the scale of the work and the importance of the legislative initiative become clear.
"I will express the opinion of probably all searchers: this is a very necessary bill, both legally and ideologically. Because we have finally paid attention to the partisans, and the underground fighters, and the concentration camp prisoners, who used to remain somehow on the sidelines. It is good that the law delineates the work, regulates the actions of the authorities and gives search organizations certain powers," says Neofitov.
It is important that the law not only delineates the powers of government bodies at different levels, but also imposes on them the responsibility for the creation, preservation and restoration of monuments and other memorial structures and objects that perpetuate the memory of those who died in the Great Patriotic War.
And although much time has passed, we can still restore the memory of the crimes against the Soviet people, not allowing the history of Russia to be rewritten and distorted, but on the contrary, casting it in bronze for future generations.