Uzbekistan exonerates over 200 of Stalin's victims

TASHKENT -- Uzbek authorities are continuing to address the judicial railroading of anti-Soviet insurgents in the 1920s and 1930s, exonerating victims of Soviet-era injustice.

The Collegium for Criminal Cases of the Uzbek Supreme Court on April 19 acquitted 208 Uzbeks who were repressed almost 100 years ago. They included natives of Fergana, Samarkand and Kashkadarya (Qashqadaryo) provinces.

Each was sentenced to death or lengthy imprisonment not by the courts but by a Soviet secret police (OGPU) "troika" on January 24, 1930, and September 11, 1931.

Troikas, three-member kangaroo courts, rapidly issued harsh sentences, including the death penalty, often in absentia and without the possibility of appeal.

Nineteen of the 208 defendants were shot. The Soviets sent another 174 to the gulag and one to a juvenile detention centre. They exiled five from Uzbekistan or other Central Asian republics. Only nine defendants were freed.

Temur Rakhmatov, a lawyer, represented the defence during the modern-day appeal process.

This time, the appeal court considered three criminal cases against members of the anti-Soviet Basmachi guerrilla movement, said Rakhmatov.

"The Basmachis ... were charged with banditry -- killing civilians and stealing other people's property."

"However, the geographic range of the defendants' activities suggests that these were not gangs but rather an entire movement aimed at achieving Turkestan's real independence," he said, using a pre-Soviet term for Central Asia. "The Red Army brutally suppressed it."

The Basmachi insurgent movement (1917-1933) was widespread in the Fergana valley and southern Uzbekistan.

Posthumous legal counsel

Archival trial records reveal many violations of the law, said Rakhmatov.

For example, his clients of almost 100 years ago did not speak Russian, since the language was hardly taught in Central Asian schools then.

They gave written explanations and testified in Uzbek. The OGPU provided no interpreters. The defendants did not understand the gravity of the accusations.

"They were not granted defence attorneys," he said. "Take [our] last case ... One of the defendants, who is now acquitted, had just reached the age of 16 at the time of sentencing. Minors must be granted a defence and a legal counsel. However, he was simply convicted."

The exoneration process is difficult because so much time has passed since the convictions, Rakhmatov said.

Today nobody is alive to provide either exculpatory or accusatory testimony, he added.

In addition, neither modern-day investigators nor the troikas had evidence or ballistics results, let alone DNA tests, to support 1930s accusations of firearm use, he noted.

"There is no evidence or facts to consider the case objectively," he said. "Back then the three military tribunal members made decisions based solely on witness testimony that the accused was seen somewhere with a gun in hand. This was the basis for sentencing someone either to death or imprisonment for a very long time."

Rehabilitation vs. 'anti-Russian act'

Since 2001, Uzbekistan has celebrated August 31 as a day of remembrance for the victims of repression.

During commemorative events on that date in 2021, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev pointed out that Soviet rulers targeted the Uzbek elite for repression.

"It is obvious that leaders with great potential, scholars, writers, doctors and teachers were repressed," he said. "They were the best of our people. The totalitarian regime had no use for smart people who would have opened the nation's eyes and strengthened its self-awareness. They were guilty only of being great."

Mirziyoyev created a national working group. It subsequently compiled a list of individuals who were sentenced to death or imprisonment in concentration camps.

The Uzbek criminal code includes Article 87, "Exemption from Liability or Punishment", which Uzbek judges have used so far to exonerate 616 defendants who suffered during the Great Terror.

However, some Russian media have interpreted Uzbek acquittals of railroaded 1930s defendants as an "anti-Russian act".

The latest Uzbek Supreme Court decisions contrast sharply with the rejection of historical accuracy in Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Memorial, an organisation that since late Soviet times worked to exonerate the Soviet citizens who were shot, sent to camps or exiled, is now banned in Russia.

What's more, some Russian politicians and public figures loyal to the Kremlin repeatedly propose to bar teaching of "The Gulag Archipelago" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the monumental history of Soviet forced-labour camps and terror.

Restoring good names of ancestors

Workers add the names of exonerated Uzbeks to a Book of Memory, said Aziza Akhrorova, a historical specialist at the Museum of Victims of Political Repression in Tashkent. So far they have inscribed 616 names.

"Descendants of the repressed often contact our museum. And we have yet to analyse many different documents from that dark era. We have yet to study the details of criminal cases and ... sentences. This is very labourious work. But it will continue," she said.

More than 100,000 Uzbeks who fought for national independence in 1937-1953 were repressed, according to Soviet records. The Soviets shot about 13,000 defendants and exiled thousands of members of the local intelligentsia.

Exoneration is the right solution, said Farkhod Mirzabayev, a political scientist from Tashkent.

"But now these [new] trials must receive greater publicity and not be conducted quietly and timidly, as is currently happening," he said. "We need to show and tell the story of each person who suffered and was subsequently exonerated."

During this period of Soviet history, the system repressed supporters of diverse political viewpoints, said Maxim Matnazarov, a scholar of Uzbek history.

"They included Jadids [Muslim modernist reformers] and members of anti-Soviet resistance movements, as well as Bolsheviks themselves, including some in leadership positions in Uzbekistan," he said.

The exoneration process honours the memory of all his compatriots who perished at Soviet hands -- those who rejected the Bolshevik ideology as well as those who served it, Matnazarov said.

"The 'blank' pages of history, whatever they may be, need to be studied," he said. "The now-living descendants of the repressed have gained the opportunity to learn about their ancestors' fate. They want their [ancestors'] good names to restored. This is difficult but necessary!"