In 2013, during a televised question-and-answer session with Russian citizens, Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to condemn Joseph Stalin’s persecution of millions in the Soviet era. “We do not need to go back to the dark period of 1937,” he told viewers. “Stalinism is associated with a personality cult and mass violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like this in Russia and, I hope, never will be again.”

Why, then, are the authorities revoking some of the official rehabilitations of Stalin’s victims that have occurred, in fits and starts, since Nikita Khrushchev’s rule in the 1950s and 1960s? It risks reopening painful wounds in society, and even tempting people to draw comparisons between Putin and Stalin, at a time when the Russian president puts a premium on national unity in the war against Ukraine.

According to a draft order prepared this month by Igor Krasnov, Russia’s chief prosecutor, the reversal of rehabilitations is limited in scope. Supposedly, it only affects “Nazi collaborators” and “traitors to the motherland” deemed to have been wrongly rehabilitated after Stalin’s death.