Political rehabilitation is the process by which a disgraced member of a political party or a government is restored to public respectability and thus political acceptability. The term is usually applied to leaders or other prominent individuals who regain their prominence after a period in which they have no influence or standing, including deceased people who are vindicated posthumously. Historically, the concept is usually associated withCommunist states andparties where, as a result of shifting political lines often as part of a power struggle, leading members of the Communist Party find themselves on the losing side of a political conflict and out of favour, often to the point of being denounced, imprisoned or even executed.

These individuals may be rehabilitated either as a result of capitulating to the dominant political line and renouncing their former beliefs or allegiances to disgraced leaders, or they may be rehabilitated as a result of a change in the political leadership of the party, either a change in personnel or a change in political line, so that the views or associations which caused the individual, or group of individuals, to fall into disgrace are viewed more sympathetically.

Well-known figures who have been rehabilitated includeDeng Xiaoping who fell into disgrace during theCultural Revolution for being a "third roader" but was rehabilitated subsequently and becameparamount leader of thePeople's Republic of China; andRussia's lastTsar,Nicholas II, andhis family, who were all shot dead byBolshevik revolutionaries in July, 1918, but were rehabilitated by theRussian Supreme Court on 1 October 2008.^[1]

Rehabilitation (Chinese:平反;pinyin:píngfǎn) was carried out at many stages in theHistory of the People's Republic of China, but most significantly during theBoluan Fanzheng period, after the3rd plenary session of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party that marked theChinese economic reforms ofDeng Xiaoping. Rehabilitation committees (Chinese:平反委员会;pinyin:Píngfǎn Wěiyuánhuì) considered appeals from both theCentral Committee of the Chinese Communist Party as well as frompetitions—often in the form ofbig-character posters—by ordinary citizens. ReformerHu Yaobang led a series of rehabilitations from 1978 to 1981 of people persecuted by theGang of Four during theCultural Revolution (1966–1976), including former chairman of ChinaLiu Shaoqi.^[2]

In the context of the formerSoviet Union, and thePost-Soviet states, rehabilitation (Russian:реабилитация,transliterated inEnglish asreabilitatsiya oracademically rendered asreabilitacija) was the restoration of a person who was criminally prosecuted without due basis, to the state ofacquittal.

Massamnesty of the victims of Soviet repressions started after the death ofJoseph Stalin. Initially, in 1953, this did not entail any form of exoneration. This release became coupled with rehabilitations afterNikita Khrushchev's denunciation ofStalinism in his 1956 speechOn the Personality Cult and its Consequences. Several entire nationality groups that had been deported to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia duringpopulation transfer were rehabilitated in the late 1950s.

Both the modernRussian Federation andUkraine^[3] have enacted laws "On the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repressions", which provide the basis for the continued post-Stalinist rehabilitation of victims.

• Self-criticism