Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has launched a fierce attack on those people who have attempted to defend the actions of Soviet leader Josef Stalin.
Mr Medvedev, whose predecessor and current Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin often ignored the heinous acts committed during the time of Stalin and highlighted instead the supposedly efficient manner in which the man who was General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1922 through 1953 led the Soviet Union to superpower status, was speaking on the date when victims of Soviet repression are remembered each year.
As the
Irish Times reports the annual day of remembrance was introduced 18 years ago by Boris Yeltsin, the first man to lead Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and a person who reportedly believed that democracy could only be established if past horrors were confronted.
But, as the
BBC confirms, those in modern day Russia who reject the manner in which Stalin is often portrayed as a hero, for example a metro station in Moscow has one of the slogans he made famous on its walls, face persecution. A historian in Northern Russia was detained recently after conducting an investigation in to the crimes Stalin committed.
Mr Medvedev's decision to speak in a video blog posted on the Kremlin website, in which he warned against rehabilitating "those responsible for exterminating their own people", a reference to the millions who died during the time of Stalin's dictatorship, may well led to some discord at the highest levels of Russian politics.
When President, Mr Putin, for whom Mr Medvedev, rightly or wrongly, is perhaps sometimes seen as a puppet, ordered the rewriting of school books to ensure that they emphasized Stalin's achievements. Therefore his reaction to his successor's comments may not be altogether positive.
Stalin is frequently praised on the basis that he led the defense of his country in World War Two, following the attack by Nazi Germany. Indeed many Russians are angry at what they see as attempts by foreign politicians to underplay the Soviet Union's role in defeating Hitler.
The resistance to the Germans put up by the Soviet Union, and how its memory must not interfere with the remembrance of other events that occurred during Stalin's reign, was touched upon by Mr Medvedev when he said:
We pay much attention to fighting the falsification of our history. For some reason we often think that this is all about resisting attempts to review the results of the Great Patriotic War. But it is also important not to allow the restoration of historical truth to be used as a pretext to rehabilitate those responsible for exterminating their own people
According to the
Irish Times Mr Medvedev is eager to see a much higher profile in the future for the day on which victims of oppression are remembered. At present the day is not a national holiday and the public appear quite indifferent to its meaning.
A lack of knowledge amongst the younger generation in Russia, regarding its country's history, is clearly worrying Mr Medvedev, 44 years old and Deputy Prime Minister for two and a half years before becoming President, for in the video blog he noted:
Two years ago sociologists conducted a poll and nearly 90 percent of our citizens, young people aged 18-24, could not even name prominent people who suffered or died in the years of the repressions. This cannot but cause concern
