The Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES) and the Max Kade Center are pleased to welcome Dr. Linda Kinstler (Harvard) on February 6. Dr. Kinstler will give a talk titled "The Body of the Crime: Soviet Rehabilitation and the Rewriting of History" at 4:00pm.

Just a few weeks after Stalin's death in March 1953, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued a decree rehabilitating certain categories of Gulag prisoners; later that year, the first posthumous rehabilitations were ordered. These measures did not offer pardon or forgiveness for past crimes, but rather decreed that no crimes had ever been committed: that there was no "corpus delicti," no body of the crime. Thousands of prisoners were allowed to return to their homes, no longer labeled as enemies of the people. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a law ordered the rehabilitation of victims of political repression, paving the way for some 3.5 million individuals to have their criminal files proverbially wiped clean. Today, the force and meaning of these rehabilitation orders are being contested and revised: in September 2024, the Russian Prosecutor General's draft order authorizing the revision of rehabilitation cases was made public, a measure that could reinstate criminal offenses for thousands of individuals, dead and alive. Not only is the order another element of the Kremlin's campaign to rewrite Russian history, but it also reflects the instability of "rehabilitation" itself, and an uncertainty about its relation to similar legal terms of amnesty, oblivion, and pardon. What does it mean for the "body of the crime," once having been lost, to be legally found again? What might the contemporary "reverse rehabilitation" initiative reveal about the manipulation of law and history, and history through law?

Linda Kinstler is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and author of Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends, for which she won a 2023 Whiting Award in Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2022 Wingate Prize for Jewish Literature. She received her PhD from the Berkeley Rhetoric Department in 2023