The European Commission rejected a proposal put forward by the governments of Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic to forbid and pursue all over Europe the denial of the Stalinist crimes exactly as it happens with the Holocaust.
The problem is to reach an agreement about the appalling violence that ravaged Eastern Europe under Communism. Russia opposes equation of Stalinist and Hitlerian massacres and historians are divided, too. A crucial node is the very definition of genocide, which comprises the attempts to eliminate religious or ethnic groups, but not social classes. Stalin's Russia back in 1948 had already opposed the introduction of this category within the United Nations. Bruxelles thus failed in reaching an agreement on the very nature of the deportations into the Gulags.
A weak point of the proposal was the stance of Lithuania, a Country notorious for belittling Hitler's crimes: its Interior Minister Stankeras defined the svastika as "an important symbol for Lithuania" and the Holocaust as "a legend".
The proposal was criticized also by Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, who said "it's impossible to compare those who conceived and built Auschwitz and those who, unfortunately committing too many horrendous crimes, liberated Europe from Nazism".