Church Remembers Stalin’s Victims, While Kremlin Looks Away
MOSCOW — A giant cross now commands the field where the first shots of Stalin’s Great Terror sounded 70 years ago. It was erected on Wednesday with religious pomp but little recognition from a government prone to whitewash one of Russia’s darkest eras.
The cross was ferried more than 800 miles by boat from a former Soviet prison camp on the White Sea through the Belomor Canal — built in the 1930s by slave labor — to Moscow, in a religious procession linking major sites from a yearlong rampage of state-sanctioned violence in that era.
The procession and the ceremony on Wednesday were a rare attempt to address Soviet brutality during Stalin’s reign, an issue, rights groups say, that is often eclipsed by the mythologized interpretation of Soviet glory promoted by Russia’s current leader, Vladimir V. Putin.
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The cross was ferried more than 800 miles by boat from a former Soviet prison camp on the White Sea through the Belomor Canal — built in the 1930s by slave labor — to Moscow, in a religious procession linking major sites from a yearlong rampage of state-sanctioned violence in that era.
The procession and the ceremony on Wednesday were a rare attempt to address Soviet brutality during Stalin’s reign, an issue, rights groups say, that is often eclipsed by the mythologized interpretation of Soviet glory promoted by Russia’s current leader, Vladimir V. Putin.