Putin opens monument to Stalin’s victims, dissidents cry foul

MOSCOW (AFP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled Monday the first national memorial to victims of Soviet-era political repression, but critics accused him of hypocrisy over a continuing crackdown on activists.

“The Wall of Grief,” a large bronze relief of human figures in central Moscow, opened following decades of efforts to create such a memorial starting under dictator Joseph Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev.

“For all of us, including future generations, it is important to remember this tragic period of our history,” Putin said at a ceremony that was also attended by Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill.

“Political repressions became a tragedy for our nation and society and a cruel blow to the roots, culture and identity of our nation. We feel their consequences until this day,” Putin said of the purges under Stalin that saw millions of people executed and sent to labor camps. He ended his speech with a quote from Natalya Solzhenitsyn, widow of the “Gulag Archipelago” author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose foundation supported the creation of the monument: “To know, to remember, to condemn and only then to forgive.”

But an open letter signed by about 40 former political prisoners ahead of the ceremony called the unveiling “untimely and cynical.”

“A memorial is a tribute to the past, but political repression in Russia is not only continuing but growing,” said the letter, whose signatories included the Soviet-era dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev.