Svetlana Alexievich accuses FSB chief of rehabilitating Stalin's secret police

Literary men and cultural figures have protested against the revival of the totalitarian traditions of the past and rehabilitation of CheKists - members. of the Stalin's secret police CheKa. The reason for the address was the interview given by FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov to Rossiyskaya Gazeta. The address has been signed by more than 80 people – members of the association Svobodnoye Slovo and literary men, colta.ru reports.

Belarusian writer and Nobel Prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich, writers Victor Shenderovich, Denis Dragunskiy, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, literary critic Alexander Arkhangelskiy, poets Sergey Gandlevsky, Lev Rubinstein and others have signed the address.

Bortnikov’s interview is ‘an important stage in the campaign of rehabilitation of chekists aiming at bringing the process of creeping Stalinization to the state level’, they write.

"The attempts to justify the state terror conducted by NKDV, Cheka, OGPU and MGB that killed millions of innocent citizens in our country are inadmissible,” the address says.

Bortnikov’s interview was published on December 20 – the day when the Bolshevist Cheka was founded. “We should not refuse to have anything to do with the word ‘chekist’ since it will result in ‘forgetting about a few generations of our ancestors’”, the FSB chief announced. Speaking about Stalin’s repressions of the 1930s, Bortnikov focused on the purge in NKDV instead of the mass repressions of other citizens. “Archives testify to the presence of impartiality in the biggest part of criminal cases including those that resulted in well-known open trials,” he added.