President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has acted to restore the rights of victims of Josef Stalin, under whose rule millions of peasants died of starvation, were shot or sent to labor camps as ``enemies of the people.'' In his toughest condemnation yet of Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture, which began in the late 1920s, Gorbachev said Monday that thousands of innocent people still bore a ``stain of injustice.'' In a sweeping decree, Gorbachev said the ``repressions conducted ... during the period of collectivization'' were ``unlawful and contradictory to the main civilian and economic rights of human beings.'' He condemned repressions against ``all citizens on political, social, ethnic, religious and other motives in the 1920s through the 1950s,'' and moved ``to completely reinstate the rights of these citizens.'' Gorbachev said the Soviet Union was taking this action now, because ``our society ... has chosen the path of moral revival, democracy and legality.'' The decree orders the government of the Soviet Union and its republics to submit, before Oct. 1, proposals to legislatures on restoring the rights of repressed citizens. Gorbachev also empowered his top advisory group, the Presidential Council, to supervise the actions. The decree, however, excludes those ``lawfully sentenced for crimes against the motherland and against the Soviet people'' during World War II and in the prewar and postwar years. It orders the Soviet government to draft legislation defining the crimes that are not subject to rehabilitation. The decree also does not consider what compensation, if any, victims should receive. An informal political group, called Memorial, has demanded compensation and restoration of rights for Stalin's victims. A special commission to study the victims of Stalinist repression has already rehabilitated thousands. ``But even now, thousands of cases haven't been considered,'' Gorbachev said in his decree. ``A stain of injustice hasn't been removed from the innocent Soviet people who suffered during forced collectivization, who were sentenced, deported with their families to remote regions without means of existence, without a right of appeal, and without even being aware of the term of their sentence.'' The decree urges specifically that clergymen and citizens persecuted for religious motives should be rehabilitated. Under Stalin, thousands of priests were shot and religious worship was sharply curtailed. In a landmark speech in November 1987, Gorbachev accused Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1924-53, of ``enormous and unforgivable'' crimes. But in that speech, he also called Stalin's collectivization ``a transformation of great importance.'' In Monday's decree, there was no such equivocation. ``Thousands of people were subject to moral and physical torture,'' it said. ``Many of them were annihilated. The lives of their families and next of kin were turned into one of humiliation and suffering without any hope.'' Western historians say as many as 20 million people were shot, starved to death in famines the Kremlin did everything to encourage, or simply vanished into the gulag during Stalin's reign of terror. Thousands of Stalin's victims were released from labor camps and rehabilitated after Nikita S. Khrushchev denounced the dictator in a secret speech to the party in 1956, three years after Stalin died.
