Rehabilitation (Soviet)

The government also rehabilitated several national groups that were relocated under Stalin, and allowed them to return to their former territories and in most cases restored their autonomous regions.

Khrushchev Thaw

The government started mass amnesty of the victims of Soviet repressions after the death of Joseph Stalin. The amnesty of 1953 was applied for those who had been sentenced for a term of at most five 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). This move effectively excluded any form of exoneration for political prisoners.

Following the arrest and execution of Lavrentiy Beria, the government of Nikita Khrushchev began to release many political prisoners from Gulag labor camps. In February 1954, Khrushchev ordered assessments on the state of political prisoners, making the first steps toward mass rehabilitation. On 11 March, his close ally, Anastas Mikoyan, publicly called for the rehabilitation of the poet Yeghishe Charents, a victim of the Great Purge, in a speech in Yerevan in his native Armenia. Behind the scenes, Mikoyan began assisting Armenian leaders in the rehabilitation of former "enemies" in the republic one week later.

On rehabilitations, both Mikoyan and Khrushchev were advised by former Gulag prisoners Alexei Snegov and Olga Shatunovskaya. Snegov strongly encouraged Khrushchev to condemn Stalin and his cult of personality at the forthcoming 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At the "closed session" of the Congress on 25 February 1956, Khrushchev strongly denounced Stalin and his crimes in his speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences". The speech signaled the start of de-Stalinization and accelerated the rehabilitation of political prisoners, allowing them to return home and reclaim their lives.

Under Stalin, several nationalities had been deported to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia during World War II. These groups were also rehabilitated during the Khrushchev Thaw. The Soviet government restored their former autonomous regions and allowed most of these nationalities to return to their former homelands. However, it did not restore territory to the Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars. The Crimean Tatars were rehabilitated in accordance with Ukaz 493 in 1967, and allowed to return to Crimea in 1990.

In most cases, the persons were released with the phrases "due to the lack of a criminal matter", "for lack of corpus delicti", "based on previously unavailable information", "due to the lack of a proof of guilt", etc. Many rehabilitations occurred posthumously, as thousands had been executed by Stalin's government or died in the harsh conditions of the labor camps.