A criminal case was opened against a resident of the Ryazan region, Maxim M., for the “rehabilitation of Nazism” (Part 4 of Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). He faces up to five years in prison for “disrespect” for the holidays of February 23 and May 9.

The reason for initiating a criminal case was posts on VKontakte. In them, he criticizes the Russian authorities for inciting wars in Chechnya and expresses a negative attitude towards the USSR Secretary General Joseph Stalin.

In particular, about February 23, the man wrote: “From an early age, on this damned day, I wondered from whom to defend the fatherland, which no one attacks, but which constantly shoots towards its borders, calling it anything but aggression . Which first offers its former subjects to take sovereignty “as much as you can carry”, and then for 10 years it ruins the unfortunate Chechnya, which took what was promised for itself. Is this what defense of the fatherland looks like?

As for May 9, according to Maxim, the holiday has long been “discredited”: “Or rather, the day of memory and sorrow, as it was originally, has been turned into a terrible orgy, a holiday of death. If, even under Yeltsin, it had been recognized at the state level that that war wiped out the best, turned into a national catastrophe, degradation of the gene pool, this terrible relapse could have been avoided. There was a feeling that Stalin had atoned for the repressions, famine and annexations of the Baltic countries, Poland and Finland. He is also personally to blame for the fact that people were thrown into the furnace of war without tactics and strategy, simply for slaughter.”