MOSCOW, May 19 (RAPSI) – Vitaly Zolochevsky, a lawmaker in Russian lower house of parliament, the State Duma, proposed to make it a criminal offence to equate Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Izvestia newspaper reported on Tuesday.

The bill would amend an article of the Criminal Code on 'rehabilitation of Nazism', according to Izvestia.

An explanatory note to the bill alleges numerous attempts to compare the political regimes of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

The current Criminal Code wording interprets the rehabilitation of Nazism as the rejection of facts sealed in the decisions of the Nuremberg Trials and the penalties meted out to the main military criminals of the European Axis powers, the justification of crimes mentioned in these decisions, as well as the public circulation of knowingly false information about the Soviet Union’s actions during WWII.

Penalties under this article include up to three years of imprisonment.

“We must do our outmost to preserve the historical heritage of victory, that is, to prevent the revival of Nazism,” Zolochevsky told Izvestia.