By Douglas Birch
Moscow - President Vladimir Putin said no one should try to make Russia feel guilty about one of the most notorious episodes of the Stalinist era -the so-called Great Purge of 1937 - saying that "in other countries even worse things happened."
Speaking at a televised meeting on Thursday with social studies teachers, Putin noted that 2007 is the 70th anniversary of a year that many Russians regard as a synonym for state-sponsored terror. It is an anniversary that has, however, gotten relatively little attention in Russian media.
"Yes, we had terrible pages" in Russia's history, Putin said in remarks broadcast on state television. "Let us recall the events since 1937, let us not forget that. But in other countries, it has been said, it was more terrible."
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Russia should "never forget" the abuses of the Communist era, Putin said. But he also said no one had the right to make Russia feel guilty about those abuses.
"No one must be allowed to impose the feeling of guilt on us," he said. "Let them think about themselves. But we must not and will not forget about the grim chapters in our history."
Political arrests on dubious charges were common throughout Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's rule, resulting in the execution of hundreds of thousands of Russians. Millions more became inmates of the gulag, the Soviet system of thousands of slave labour camps.
But large-scale arrests of Communist Party members began in 1934 and seemed to reach a crescendo in 1936-1937, when a series of show trials in Moscow were held, featuring dramatic courtroom confessions.
Thousands of bureaucrats, military officers and party officials were rounded up and imprisoned by the NKVD, one of the predecessor agencies to the KGB. Many were shot after secret trials.
Russia has never sought to bring to justice KGB officials implicated in human rights abuses committed during the Communist era.
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