PUTIN PAYS RESPECTS TO VICTIMS OF STALIN-ERA TERROR. President Putin on October 30 participated in a religious service to remember the victims of Stalin-era repressions, "Trud" and other Russian media reported. Putin became the first Russian leader to visit the memorial to Stalin's victims at the Butovsky Firing Range in southern Moscow, on the site where an estimated 20,000 people were summarily executed by the Stalin-era precursor to the KGB. Putin called the Stalinist terror "a particular tragedy for our nation." Putin added that the development of the country calls for the "constructive, not destructive" "battle of opinions." Arseny Roginsky, an activist with the Memorial NGO, said Putin's appearance at the ceremony was "a positive event." Roginsky added that Memorial has asked the government to cooperate with it in publishing a book about the repressions, creating a museum dedicated to the topic, and introducing the subject to school curricula. "We are waiting from the leadership of the country orders to state organs -- particularly the Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Service (FSB) -- compelling them to do everything possible to locate mass graves in our country," he said. Memorial estimates that there are 800,000 people living in Russia who were either victims of political repression or the children of victims. The FSB has estimated that some 12.5 million people throughout the Soviet Union were repressed during Stalin's reign. In his 1968 book "The Great Terror," British historian Robert Conquest put the figure at anywhere between 12 million and 20 million.
(Fonte: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty).
