Rehabilitation (Soviet)

Rehabilitation (Russian: реабилитация, transliterated in English as reabilitatsiya or academically rendered as reabilitacija) was a term used in the context of the former Soviet Union, and the Post-Soviet states. Beginning after the death of Stalin in 1953, the government undertook the political and social restoration, or political rehabilitation, of persons who had been repressed and criminally prosecuted without due basis. It restored the person to the state of acquittal. In many cases, rehabilitation was , as thousands of victims had been executed or died in labor camps.

The government also rehabilitated several minority populations which it had relocated under Stalin, and allowed them to return to former territories and in some cases restored their autonomy in those regions.

The government started mass amnesty of the victims of Soviet repressions after the death of Joseph Stalin. In 1953, this did not entail any form of exoneration. The government released the amnestees into internal exile in remote areas, without any right to return to their original places of settlement.

The amnesty was applied first for those who had been sentenced for a term of at most 5 years and had been prosecuted for non-political articles in the Soviet Criminal Code (for example, children of those repressed on political grounds were often prosecuted as "antisocial elements", i.e., on the same grounds as prostitutes). In 1954, the government began to release many political prisoners from Gulag labor camps.

In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev, then in the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, denounced Stalinism in his notable speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences. Afterward, the government accompanied release of political prisoners with rehabilitation, allowing them to return home and reclaim their lives.

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