Embarking on a quest for historical justice, prosecutors in central Russia formally rehabilitated a local peasant executed in 1918 for opposing the Bolsheviks.
Two Communists dispatched to the village of Yemangashi as part of the notorious grain confiscation campaign during the Russian Civil War were murdered by a peasant mob, Nizhny Novgorod region’s prosecutors said on Friday.
A squad of Chekists, KGB forerunners, was dispatched to Yamangashi and promptly executed 20 suspects, including one Alexander Runovsky, the prosecutors said on their website.
But there was no evidence that Runovsky was actually involved in the mobbing, the report said.
The man was cleared of all charges in accordance with a perestroika law from 1991 on rehabilitation of victims of political repressions, the prosecutors said.
It remained unclear whether the other 19 executed peasants were to have their cases revised as well.
The civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 raged until the early 1920s. Estimates for casualties range from 3 million to 10 million people, including up to 2 million victims of Red and White Terror, or mass extrajudicial killings carried out by the warring sides.