A large protest was held in Tbilisi on Saturday to demand harsh punishment for a woman accused of defacing a religious icon depicting Soviet dictator Josef Stalin which was recently-installed in the Georgian capital. The suspect is alleged to have splashed paint on the icon, which was on display in the city's main Holy Trinity Cathedral, on Tuesday in an act of protest that exposed deep divisions in Georgia over the former Soviet dictator's legacy in his homeland. Alt-Info, the pro-Russian ultra-conservative movement that organised the protest, used a post on the Telegram messaging app to compare the "desecration" of the icon to repression of religion that occurred under Stalin's regime.
Russian politicians announced in late 2023 that the Soviet counterintelligence unit SMERSH was being re-established, and photos of operatives wearing SMERSH uniform patches appeared in open sources in early January, UK Defence Intelligence reports.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, in a ranting speech before a presidential election campaign, cast Moscow's military action in Ukraine as an existential battle against purported attempts by the West to destroy Russia. Putin, who has been in power for more than two decades and is the longest-serving Russian leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, is expected to soon declare his intention to seek another six-year term in a presidential election next March. “We are defending the security and well-being of our people, the highest, historical right to be Russia — a strong, independent power, a country-civilization,” Putin said, accusing the U.S. and its allies of trying to “dismember and plunder” Russia.
People across Ukraine and around the world will light candles tomorrow in memory of the millions of Ukrainians killed in the artificial famine engineered by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s regime in the 1930s. Known to history as the Holodomor, this man-made famine remained hidden in the Soviet shadows for decades. In recent years, a growing number of countries have finally recognized the famine as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian nation, but despite this growing international awareness, many have yet to grasp the chilling continuity between Stalin’s attempt to erase Ukraine and the genocidal objectives of today’s Russian invasion.
Igor Orlovsky, a resident of Russia's Krasnoyarsk Krai, was sentenced to seven and half years in prison for critical comments about the invasion of Ukraine and the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, the Russian independent outlet OVD-Info reported on Nov. 13.