The Seventy Years Declaration was a declaration initiated by academics
Dovid Katz and
Danny Ben-Moshe and released on 20 January 2012 to protest against the policies of several European states and
European Union bodies on the evaluation, remembrance and prosecution of crimes committed under communist dictatorships in Europe, specifically policies of many European countries and the EU treating the Nazi and Stalinist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe as equally criminal....was opposed by Russian bodies and organisations affiliated with Putin's government, such as the Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia's Interests and World Without Nazism. It was also opposed by several European communist parties, such as the Communist Party of Greece and the Communist Party of Britain. There were isolated critiques of the Prague Declaration in 2009 by (in chronological order of appearance in print): Dovid Katz, formerly professor of Yiddish at Vilnius University, who founded the web journal Defending History in part to oppose the Prague Declaration; Israeli activist Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Israel office