Policeman kidnapped in Chechnya

GROZNY, March 25, 2004 (RIA Novosti) - A Chechen policeman from Grozny was kidnapped in the village of Urus Martan on Wednesday. Unknown people wearing camouflage uniforms broke into the policeman's home and took him away in their car threatening him with automatic weapons, Chechnya's law enforcement bodies told RIA Novosti.

The kidnapped Sergeant Bisultanov was spending his holiday at home. Investigation is under way.

Three locals were injured by a trip bomb in the city of Gudermes on the same day. They were collecting scrap near a cemetery outside the city and touched a wire connected to a bomb. It is not clear who had planted the bomb. 24.03.2004

Stalinist Purge Victims’ Names Released

Russia’s leading human rights groups released a list Wednesday of morethan a million of people who fell victim to Josef Stalin’s purges — anattempt to draw public attention to the Soviet dictator’s crimes in asociety still divided over his legacy.

The 1,345,796 names, compiled on a CD-ROM along with brief biographiesof the victims, represent only a small portion of those who suffered inthe purges, but are all the cases that activists have been able todocument so far.

Stalin came to power after the death of Soviet founder V.I. Lenin in1924 and began a reign of terror that lasted nearly three decades,ending only with his death in 1953. An estimated 20 million people wereexecuted, imprisoned or deported to other parts of the former SovietUnion. Altogether, 10 million are believed to have died.

``This list is intended to help people search for their relatives whosuffered repressions,’’ said Arseny Roginsky, chairman of the Memorialhuman rights group. ``But it also is a warning to the society and theauthorities about what happens in a country where power is unchecked bythe society.’’

The CD contains the names of those on the so-called ``Stalin’s lists’’ —some 44,000 people tried for political offenses on Stalin’s personalorders, the majority of whom were executed.

It also has maps and statistics about the Soviet gulag, or labor campsystem, and the location of monuments to victims of Soviet repression.

Alexander Yakovlev, an ex-member of the Communist Party Politburo and akey architect of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s democraticreforms, said the project was ``an important sign of the penitence ofthe society.’’

``Unfortunately, a part of our society would like to forget about thisterror, while another part doesn’t know about it or doesn’t believeit,’’ said Yakovlev, who now heads the presidential commission forrehabilitation of victims of repression.

A recent poll conducted by the independent ROMIR agency found 45 percentof respondents saying that Stalin played a largely positive role inRussia’s history. Also, Stalin was named the second most successfulRussian leader since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, ceding first placeonly to President Vladimir Putin.

The nationwide poll of 1,500 gave its margin of error as 2.6 percentagepoints.

Yury Samodurov, head of the Moscow’s Sakharov museum, named after thelate Soviet dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov,complained that the project received no help from the government eitherfinancially or in terms of access to state archives.

The state ``is not striving to acknowledge the fact that this(repression) was a crime,’’ he said.

AP