Gorbachev calls for purge museum

By Richard Galpin BBC News, Moscow

Mr Gorbachev said the repression touched almost every family in Russia

The Soviet Union's last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, has signed a petition for a museum to commemorate the millions of victims of communist repression.

Mr Gorbachev said the special museum should be set up inside what was one of the most notorious Soviet detention centres, the Butyrka prison in Moscow.

The petition's organisers, Memorial, said Russians today were in danger of forgetting the brutality of the past.

They also criticised the glorification of former leader Josef Stalin by some.

In 1937, Stalin launched his Great Purge, intensifying his campaign against anyone he saw as a threat to his regime. Those included political opponents, but also the army, the intelligentsia, members of the clergy and peasants.

Overlooking purges

The leader famous for introducing the reforms which eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union now wants to ensure that the worst excesses of the communist regime are not forgotten.

This is a big problem for our country ... We should do much more - the rehabilitation of the victims is still not complete Mikhail Gorbachev Former Soviet leader

Mr Gorbachev, along with other political figures, scientists and human rights activists, signed a petition calling for the museum to be built inside the Butyrka prison in the centre of the Russian capital.

During the purges ordered by Stalin, 20,000 political prisoners were held at a time inside this jail.

Those who escaped the firing squad were transported to the prison camps around the country known as the Gulag.

Amongst those who spent time at Butyrka was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the Soviet Union's most famous dissidents and writers.

Human rights activists at Wednesday's news conference said they were concerned that the Russian people were in danger of forgetting what happened under the communists.

They said many of those who survived the brutal punishments had now died and they warned, as a result, that Stalin was already being rehabilitated in the national consciousness.

Some historians focus on the rapid industrialisation of Russia under Stalin, overlooking the cost in terms of starvation, repression and extermination of opponents.

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