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🚨 J-7 : Séminaire "Soviet War Crime Trials, 1955-1985" - 23 avril 2025 With Vanessa Voisin (University of Bologna - professeure invitée MSH), David Alan Rich (Catholic University of America; ICON, Utrecht University) & Pieter Lagrou (ULB - CREG). In collaboration with MMC - Mondes modernes et contemporains ULB. In 1981, the Eastern District Court of Pennsylvania, seated in Philadelphia, issued a ruling that would make jurisprudence. In the case United States vs. Trucis, the US government sought the revocation of Arnolds Trucis naturalization in 1956, because Trucis had “knowingly concealed certain biographical facts” in his application for citizenship. Trucis argued that the documents produced to prove his involvement in war crimes and acts of genocide in Lavia were worthless. “In support of the motion, Trucis has cited, at great length, the "exploits of the KGB," Lenin's writings and extracts from books on the Soviet legal system.” The court ruled, however: “While certain of these references remind us that the Soviet legal system is unlike our own, with less of an institutional and constitutional commitment to the adversary process, the references do not establish as matter of law that no deposition taken in the Soviet Union would be reliable.” The 1981 ruling set an important precedent. As long as the Cold War lasted, Soviet judicial documentation was routinely discarded as “Stalinist propaganda” in the West, by lawyers and historians alike. And yet, by the 1970s, investigating judges in the US timidly came to admit the quality of some of the evidence produced by the Soviet judiciary as equal or even superior to the some of the materials produced in Israel and West Germany. Historians took two more decades to come to the same conclusion. The history of the war in the East could only start to be written once the ideological refusal of judicial sources produced by the Soviet Union was overcome. Indeed, after a first wave of major trials taking place in the 1940’s, a series of second waves occurred, starting the 1960s, worldwide. The Soviet Union was very much part of this international chronology. A major amnesty law was adopted in 1955, allowing for the return of hundreds of thousands of individuals convicted of collaboration from the Gulag and internal relegation. But the law did not include the karateli or war criminals guilty of blood crimes. The amnesty coincided with the opening of a series of new investigations, as part of a thorough movement of judicial reform and methods of investigation, culminating in the codification of the imprescriptibility of war crimes in 1965. The Soviet “second wave” bears witness to the transformation brought about by destalinization to the Soviet legal system and it did produce an enormous amount of original historical documentation, both in quantity and in quality. Monday 23rd June 2025, from 9.30 am until 12.30 pm ➡️https://lnkd.in/e9waDbTX