Russia’s Putin commemorates Stalin’s victims

Rights activists said the president’s actions were an election ploy.

MOSCOW (AP) — President Vladimir Putin warned Tuesday against political ideas that are “placed above basic values” as he for the first time joined public commemorations on the 70th anniversary of mass killings ordered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Putin’s presence at the Butovo firing range, where some 20,000 priests, artists and other “enemies of the people” were executed in 1937-38, was a noteworthy gesture by the former KGB officer, who has restored Soviet-era symbols and tried to soften public perceptions of Stalin.

Rights activists, however, said the visit to mourn victims of the “Great Purge” was an election ploy and warned that the consolidation of power that has occurred under Putin risks returning Russia to the repression of the communist era.

Putin joined the head of the Russian Orthodox Church for a ceremony at the recently built Church of New Martyrs and Confessors and laid red roses at a 40-foot wooden cross carved at a monastery on the White Sea’s Solovki Islands. The islands were home to one of the earliest and most notorious labor camps in the Soviets’ gulag network.

The two then strolled through the fog-shrouded birches and dampened grass growing among long earthen mounds that hold Butovo’s mass graves. The field was used for executions from the 1930s until Stalin died in 1953.

Later, Putin looked at a paneled explanation of the site, complete with a day-by-day tally of the killings and photographs of gaunt and haggard victims.

“These tragedies have occurred iPutin’s visit was significant since his government had largely ignored the 70th anniversary all year, even as the Orthodox Church held a series of ceremonies to commemorate “martyrs” — priests executed by the Soviet police — and other victims.

The president has tried to soften public perceptions of Stalin as part of an effort to restore Russians’ pride in their Soviet-era history. In June, he told history teachers that although the 1937 mass slaughter was one of the most notorious episodes of the Stalin era, no one should try to make Russia feel guilty about it because “in other countries even worse things happened.”