Russian liberal sentenced for comparing Stalin to Hitler

MOSCOW (AP) — A Moscow court has handed a 15-day prison sentence to a 72-year-old liberal politician who drew parallels between Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s regime and Nazi Germany. Leonid Gozman was sentenced for his 2020 post on Facebook, in which he mocked a Russian law that banned likening the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany, saying that “it’s wrong to put an equal mark between them — Hitler was an absolute evil and Stalin even worse.” On Tuesday, Moscow’s Tverskoy District Court ruled that Gozman’s remark violated the law. Gozman, a vocal critic of the Kremlin’s campaign in Ukraine, left Russia when it started but returned in June in what he has described as a “moral” choice.