Stalin grandson loses defamation suit

September 22, 2010 5:55AM

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/stalin-grandson-loses-defamation-suit/story-e6frf7jx-1225927636457

A MOSCOW court today rejected a case by Joseph Stalin's grandson alleging Russian archives were falsified to show the Soviet dictator ordered the 1940 killing of Polish officers at Katyn.

Evgeny Dzhugashvili, who bears Stalin's birth name, filed the defamation suit against Russia's Federal Archive Agency for 10 million rubles (about $US320,000) in moral damages in June following its online publication of the documents.

Mr Dzhugashvili alleges that five of the documents are fake, and demanded their removal from the site rusarchives.ru.

Moscow's Tverskoy court today turned down the suit, a court spokeswoman said.

Among the five documents is a March 1940 memo from the head of secret police Lavrenty Beria to Joseph Stalin proposing to execute Polish officers held in prisoner camps.

Approximately 22,000 Polish officers were shot dead by the NKVD secret police in the spring of 1940 in the Katyn forest, near the city of Smolensk in western Russia.

In a separate case today, another Moscow court identified behind closed doors the individual responsible for classifying documents related to a probe into the Katyn massacre, which was closed by prosecutors in 2004.

Memorial, an international rights group that focuses on victims of political repression from the former Soviet Union, sued the Russian military two years ago demanding it declassify a prosecutors' decree to close the decade-long Katyn investigation.

"The hearing today sheds some light, but it is not clear whether it will lead to the declassification of the decree," Memorial board member Yan Rachinsky said.

Memorial said it cannot disclose the details of the court hearing due to its closed-door nature. The next court hearing for the case is scheduled for October 11, Memorial employee Alexander Guryanov told the Echo of Moscow radio.

Russia's decision to close the Katyn investigation has long strained ties with Poland.

The rights group wants the authorities to reopen the investigation and declassify the entire Katyn case.

Only 67 of nearly 190 volumes in the Katyn case have been handed over to Poland, while the rest are still marked top secret. Some documents were declassified in 1992 but were not made public until this year.

For decades, Moscow blamed the Katyn massacre on Nazi Germany, until Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev finally admitted in 1990 that the Polish officers had been executed by Stalin's NKVD secret police.