Return to the Past

The re-criminalizing of "slander" in the draft law No. 3879 adopted by a show of hands in Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada today is essentially a return to the law on anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, which was defined as: 

propaganda or agitation with the purpose of undermining or weakening of the Soviet power or with the purpose of committing or incitement to commit particularly grave crimes against the Soviet state (as defined in the law);

the spreading with the same purposes of slanderous fabrications that target the Soviet political and social system;

production, dissemination or storage, for the same purposes, of literature with anti-Soviet content