Following the Greek Justice Minister Stavros Kontonis’s declining an invitation to attend an international conference on the crimes committed by communist regimes, which is organised by the Estonian government, the leftist SYRIZA-led government went a step further by essentially equating the current Estonian government to Nazi sympathisers. Maria Yannakaki, the Secretary General for Transparency and Human Rights, a body under the Justice Ministry’s auspices, retweeted a post regarding Donald Trump and the Charlottesville incident on her feed which read “There is a term for people who say ‘Both sides are bad’ when one side is nazis. They are called Nazi sympathisers”. Mrs. Yannakaki commented on the tweet: “This was written about Trump and Charlottesville, but it totally fits the Estonians and their Conference”. Twitter users took Mr. Kontonis and her subordinate Mrs. Yannaskaki to task flooding the social media platform with critical comments. “Kontonis learnt about communism in Kolonaki The Russian learnt it in the Gulags”, one user wrote, while another berated him for saying the Estonians who had suffered under Soviet occupation for 50 years did not know about communism. In the 2008 Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism it was stated that crimes committed under communism were often crimes against humanity, according to the definition developed in the Nuremberg Trials, and that the crimes committed under communism and Nazism were comparable.
The highest death tolls that have been documented in communist states occurred in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, in the People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong, and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
The estimates of the number of non-combatants killed by these three regimes alone range from 21-70 million.