Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree last week establishing April 19 as the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People perpetrated by the Nazis and their accomplices during World War II – without ever mentioning Jews or Jewish victims.
The draft law for the Day of Remembrance was developed by Russia’s State Duma Committee on Defence in November 2025. April 19 was proposed as the date as on April 19, 1943, the first legal act was issued that officially documented the Nazis’ policy of exterminating civilians in Nazi-occupied territories (Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR No. 39).
Decree No. 39 went on to form the legal foundation for bringing to justice Nazi criminals and their accomplices, including Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, and Finnish military personnel.
Russian erasure of Jewish Holocaust victims
State Duma chairman Vyacheslav Volodin, who proposed the bill, said it is Russia’s duty to preserve the memory of the “feat of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers who saved the whole world from the Nazis” and not “let others forget the truth about the atrocities of the Nazis and the heroism of the Soviet people.”
“Millions of civilians were killed, burned alive, tortured in concentration camps by the occupation. Not a single country during the Second World War suffered such sacrifices that fell to the lot of the Soviet people,” he added.
“April 19 serves as a reminder to the whole world of the need to do everything to ensure that genocide never and nowhere is repeated,” the explanatory note published on the website of the lower house of parliament says.
The bill – and subsequent reporting – speaks extensively about the “genocide” of Soviet prisoners, the concentration camps, and the extermination camps, without mentioning Jewish victims.
State-owned news agency TASS spoke of the camp in Maly Trostenets in Belarus, famous for its atrocities, where at least 200,000 were killed. It does not mention that the majority of those killed in the camp were Jews, many of whom were from the Soviet Union. From around 1942, approximately 100,000 Jews were believed to have been murdered there.
The reporting on the bill also mentioned Soviet victims at the extermination camps in Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald. About 40,000 were murdered at Dachau, of which about 4,000 were Soviet. Around 30,000 died at Sachsenhausen, of which around 11,000 were Jews and 11,000-18,000 were Soviet. Around 56,000-60,000 were killed at Buchenwald, of which 8,500 or so were Soviet and over 11,000 were Jewish.
In total, of the around six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, two million were Jews from Soviet countries.
According to Russian statistics, a confirmed 26.6 million Soviet citizens were killed by the Nazis following their invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 (about 14% of the population at the time). However, the estimated losses are closer to 50 million people.
As Putin noted in a speech in July 2020, there is no statute of limitations in Russia for the crimes of the Nazis. This means the acts of the Nazis are seen as perpetual crimes against humanity, and the country continues to prosecute perpetrators, commemorate victims, and legally prevent the denial or distortion of history.
It is worth noting that April 19 is also the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.