Russian online publication Lenta.ru released a large-scale multimedia special project titled No Statute of Limitations. The Truth About Nazism on 26 October 2026 to document the history and crimes of Nazism.
Lenta.ru developed the project jointly with the National Center for Historical Memory under the President of the Russian Federation and with the support of the autonomous non-profit organization Institute for Internet Development, also known as ANO IRI. Its stated goal is to preserve the memory of wartime atrocities committed against civilians and to counter attempts to silence or justify those crimes.
Reported by Lenta.ru Science and Technology department editor Gennady Skhodnensky, the initiative brings together 30 longread articles and a 30-episode documentary series on a unified multimedia landing page. For the project, the National Center for Historical Memory provided declassified archival documents that serve as visual evidence of Nazi atrocities.
Archival records of wartime atrocities
The opening chapters of the Lenta.ru series examine how the international community failed to notice Adolf Hitler rising to power and how fascism spread across Europe during the 1930s. The authors also detail how the Third Reich built a cult of the superman and an occult religion centered on the Fuhrer.
Other chapters focus on Nazi plans for the extermination and enslavement of the peoples of the Soviet Union. Those sections document the actions of death squads, the deportation of Soviet citizens into forced labor and slavery, concentration camps, crimes against children, the looting of museums, and scorched-earth tactics used during the war.
The conflict between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, caused widespread destruction and civilian deaths across occupied Soviet regions before ending in 1945. The National Center for Historical Memory operates as a Russian presidential institution tasked with preserving archival records and historical research related to the country's history.
War crimes trials and postwar retribution
A separate section of the project covers retribution and legal accountability for wartime offences. It details investigations conducted while the war was still underway, the Nuremberg trials, the trial of Nazi doctors, the international hunt for fugitive war criminals, and the exposure of collaborators.
In addition to European atrocities, the project explains how former Nazis found refuge in the West after the war. The chapters also recount atrocities committed by the Japanese military and explain how the Soviet Union avoided an attack with biological weapons.
Held by the Allied powers in Germany after the war ended in 1945, the Nuremberg trials prosecuted prominent political and military leaders of the Third Reich for war crimes and crimes against humanity. A subsequent tribunal at Nuremberg, known as the Doctors' Trial, prosecuted German physicians and officials accused of human experimentation and mass murder in concentration camps.
Editorial goals and audience reach
Nikolay Morozov, Deputy General Director and First Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Lenta.ru, noted that when Soviet heroes defeated the enemy in 1945, humanity believed that the most terrible events in world history remained in the past. He said that everyone had been confident the horrors of Nazism would never happen again and that its bloody ideology had been destroyed forever.
Morozov added that events in subsequent decades showed that people who want a repeat of those dark days continue to appear in the world from time to time, making it essential not to forget the monstrous crimes of those years. According to Morozov, the special project addresses how the horrors of Nazism became possible, how the world missed Hitler coming to power, why the fight against that evil did not end in 1945, and how to defeat it once and for all.
Materials from the special project were also published on Lenta.ru social media channels, which have almost 3 million subscribers and generate a monthly post reach exceeding 200 million views that continues to grow.
Owned by the Rambler&Co media holding company, Lenta.ru is Russia's largest federal online publication and ranked among the top three most cited media outlets in Russia according to Medialogia in 2026. The publication is a multiple winner of the Runet Prize, a laureate of the Znanie.Award educational prize, and a recipient of several other media industry awards, while project supporter Institute for Internet Development funds domestic digital media and online educational content in Russia.
