Visit our website: HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------------------------- http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/09/02/MN221252.DTL ----------------------------------------------- Sunday, September 2, 2001 (SF Chronicle) Stalin purges now blamed on Nazis Anna Badkhen, Special to the Chronicle Tsna, Belarus -- Every evening for four years, Roman Batyan heard people being shot to death. Now 88, Batyan says the killings took place within a 10-foot fence around the field of Kurapaty, half a mile outside his wooden shack on the northern outskirts of Minsk. Truckloads of people were brought there at dusk, he recalls, and by night, they were killed. That was the era of Stalinist purges, which swept across Belarus between 1937 and 1941, killing 2 million people in the former Soviet republic. Historians say about 30,000 victims of Joseph Stalin's regime are lying unnamed in unmarked graves in the pine forest planted in Kurapaty after World War II. Yet Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko -- an ardent advocate of restoring the Soviet Union -- is trying to shift blame for the killings from Stalin's secret police and onto Nazi Germany. When the graves in Kurapaty were discovered in 1988, in the era of glasnost, the Belarusian government said the bodies belonged to people who were killed by the NKVD, the Stalin-era predecessor of the KGB secret police. Now the official line is that the bodies most likely were of 7,000 Belarusian Jews killed by the Nazis during their wartime occupation from 1941 to 1944. It is a complicated issue in a land where every schoolchild knows that a quarter of Belarus' wartime population was wiped out during the German occupation. Yet no one mentions that the country also lost a fifth of its population of 10 million in executions carried out by the NKVD. Now, barely distinguishable between stately pine trees, a large wooden cross is the only tribute to the massacre. Lukashenko canceled the reparations that were being paid to victims of Stalinist repression and their families. --------------------------- Copyright 2001 SF Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email alerts & NEW webcam video instant messaging with Yahoo! Messenger http://im.yahoo.com ------------------------------------------------- This Discussion List is the follow-up for the old stopnato @listbot.com that has been shut down ==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9spWA Or send an email To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This email was sent to: [email protected] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
