President Vladimir Putin attended a ceremony commemorating the people executed during Stalin’s "Great Purge" implemented in Russia at about 1937. The ceremony that marked 70 years that passed since the atrocities took place at Butovo in southern Moscow where the remains of approximately 20,000 people executed a on a field in the Russian capital were buried.

President Putin is widely regarded as a leader which undermines the post-Communist freedoms of Russia. Among other things, he is also suspected of being involved in the mysterious killing of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of the perhaps too authoritarian Russian president.

What makes this event a main focus is the fact that this is the first time when president Putin publicly commemorates the millions of victims of the Stalinist oppression. Please note that Putin served in the Soviet KGB.
 
Putin held the customary presidential speech and he talked, evidently, about the millions of people that were killed during the communist rule in Russia. His speech was surprisingly democratic this time. Putin underlined the fact that the Soviet Union overlooked the "fundamental" human values as well as the importance of preserving political diversity.

"For our country this is a particular tragedy. Its dimensions are huge, hundreds of thousands, millions of people were exterminated, people who had their own opinions and were not afraid to express them -- the cream of the nation," he said. One can’t help but think at Anna Politkovskaya when following that description.

On a typical Russian cold and foggy day of autumn those attending the commemoration placed flowers beneath a cross erected for the 20,000 people exterminated on the field near Moscow.  

While viewing the pictures placed at the graves, President Putin exclaimed: 

"It seems incredible, madness."

In the mean time, another memorial ceremony was held outside the feared ex-head quarters of the Soviet KGB, the Lubyanka. The almost 1000 people attending the separate ceremony were unhappy with Putin’s contradictory assertions and have chosen to commemorate the victims separately. Memorial, a Russian human rights organization, has been reading the names of repression victims at the place of the ceremony.

Just a few months ago Putin had spoken about the collapse of the Soviet Union and expressed his lament about the "unfortunate" event in the country’s history. During the same speech, Putin asserted that "all states have their ups and downs," but when it comes to atrocities, Russia stood up quite well in comparison with the United States and the killings it committed in its war waged on Vietnam.

The Death Toll of "the Great Purge"

The exact figures of the killings that took place during "the Great Purge", or "the Great Terror", are still unknown. The Soviet archives during 1937 and 1938 were declassified and supposedly showed that the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) detained 1,548,367 victims, of whom 681,692 were shot. That amounts to an average of 1,000 executions a day.

However, historians have very different opinions on this matter. For example, Michael Ellman argues that the most accurate estimate of deaths caused by the NKVD operations during these two years is the range 950,000 to 1.2 million.

As this wasn’t enough for the Russian people, the Second World War broke out shortly after "the Great Purge" and with around 27 million people killed during the vast conflagration the Soviet Union was the one that had about half of the WW II casualties.