Russia's supreme court is considering a petition to rehabilitate the sinister figure of Lavrenty Beria, one of Stalin's most remorseless henchmen who was, as head of the secret police, complicit in the deaths of millions of innocent Soviet citizens.
The most unlikely case to be examined by the military prosecutor's rehabilitation department to date, Beria's dossier is being subjected to the same degree of scrutiny as that given to more traditional candidates for rehabilitation.
Human rights groups, who usually work to rehabilitate the victims rather than the perpetrators of Stalin's repression, admit wearily there are legal grounds for this review. Although Beria was guilty of murder and unspeakable cruelty, the charges on which he was sentenced to death in 1953 were trumped-up and absurd, and the case against him was a clear violation of legal justice.
Sidelined in the power struggle that followed Stalin's death, Beria was accused of anti-state terrorism and high treason, as well as the particularly ludicrous charge of being a British spy.
A more detailed preliminary list of charges also claimed he had tried to undermine the cattle-breeding and vegetable production programmes. The crimes for which he is remembered - such as the brutal evacuations of ethnic groups from the Caucasus, which sowed the seeds of today's conflict - were too sensitive to mention. Beria's case is being considered along with those of six other secret police officials shot with him. Relatives of several of the men wanted the cases reconsidered.
The department for the exoneration of victims of political repression advised earlier this month that Beria should not be absolved, but the supreme court is not obliged to pay any attention to this recommendation. Lawyers are examining 35 volumes of documents on the criminal proceedings that led to Beria's execution - none of which has ever been opened to academic scrutiny; a decision is expected next month.
'The relatives of the dead men are abusing the rehabilitation system, but they've got a right to abuse it,' explained Nikita Petrov, a historian working for the human rights group Memorial. 'They hope to prove that the charges were politically motivated; from a legal point of view this is quite reasonable. If someone is wrongly executed on the basis of false charges, then they have the right to be rehabilitated.'
The rehabilitation last year of Viktor Abakumov, a secret police official executed on treason charges in 1954, may have inspired relatives of other Stalin-era officials to try their luck. Last month Stalin's son, Vassily, jailed for eight years for 'anti-Soviet statements', also had his reputation partly salvaged. 'It will be interesting to see how the supreme court deals with this dilemma.' said Petrov. 'If they uphold the original charges, they will avoid the problems associated with rehabilitating someone like Beria - but they risk sanctioning the absurd legal process which led to his execution.' One solution would be to refuse to rehabilitate Beria, but to remove the British spy charge.
'But modifying the charges raises another potential problem, namely that in 1953, theoretically, the death sentence could be awarded as punishment for two crimes - spying and sabotage. And to remove the charge that he was a British spy leaves the court with the problem of whether to change his sentence from execution to a prison term, which is absurd when the man in question was shot 46 years ago,' Petrov said.
News of the case was greeted with disdain by the historian and Beria specialist Yury Zhukov, but not because he felt Beria's was an undeserving case. 'Every time there is an election in Russia, themes like the gulags, Stalin's purges, Soviet-era repression and Beria come mysteriously to the fore again - simply because the Kremlin wants to scupper the chances of the left-wing opposition by reminding the nation of the horrors of communism.'