Moscow - Stalin's grandson Yevgeny Dzhugashvili has asked Ukrainian courts and investigators to explain on what grounds Bolshevik leaders have been found guilty of genocide against Ukrainians during the 1932-1933 Holodomor famine.
"We took our request to the Ukrainian embassy, but they didn’t accept it. For that reason, we sent the request by registered mail. We are asking the Ukrainian Court of Appeals to provide [copies of] the entire case and all documents relating to the investigation," Dzhugashvili’s lawyer Leonid Zhura told reporters on Friday.
In an online video address, Dzhugashvili asked the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s office to open a criminal case against the Ukrainian Security Service officials who accused Stalin of crimes and the judges who he said did not give his grandfather defense lawyers and issued an unfair sentence.
"The information that grandfather committed crimes enshrined by the Soviet laws and the current Ukrainian laws is a cynical lie," Dzhugashvili said.
"From a formal viewpoint, genocide was not a crime in Ukraine and in the world in general in the 1930s. Consequently, the Ukrainian Security Service officials and judges have cynically breached Item 1 of Article 7 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which states that "no one shall be held guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence under national or international law at the time when it was committed."
"My grandfather Stalin was accused and convicted for a crime that did not exist. The investigators have breached the article entitled ‘No Punishment Without a Law’. The article on genocide was put in place only in the 1990s," Dzhugashvili said.
The Kyiv Court of Appeals on January 13 found Bolshevik leaders of the USSR and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic guilty of killing millions of people during the 1932-1933 Holodomor famine. The court qualified Holodomor as genocide.
