Nightlife
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin"s speech was...
In his speech today, Putin said, "Stalinist repression swept people away regardless of their ethnic origin, convictions or religious beliefs. Whole social classes became victims - Cossacks, clergymen, ordinary peasants, professors, officers, some of whom served in the Tsarist army and then came to serve the Soviet state but were still not spared."This passage from Putin"s speech will no doubt be met with criticism in Poland. Lech Kaczynski keeps repeating that the officers in Katyn were shot because they were POLISH officers. But the documents show that in the eyes of the Politburo members and Stalin himself the victims of Katyn were considered Soviet citizens. At the time of the massacre in the spring of 1940, Poland did not exist as a state. One chunk of pre-war Poland belonged to Nazi Germany, while the other belonged to the U.S.S.R. The more than 21,000 Polish officers who found themselves at Stalin"s mercy shared the fate of millions of Soviet citizens.