Moscow – Russian Orthodox priests consecrated a wooden cross Wednesday at a site south of Moscow where firing squads executed thousands of people 70 years ago at the height of Josef Stalin’s political purges.
Created at a monastery that housed one of the first Soviet labor camps, the 40-foot cross has been embraced as a memorial to the mass suffering under Stalin.
The ceremony at the Church of New Martyrs and Confessors, built recently at the Butovo site, is one of a series of events planned throughout this year to mark the 70th anniversary of the Great Purge of 1937.
Hundreds of people, most of them women wearing colorful headscarves, laid flowers and lit candles under the cross. There were no representatives of the government, which has shown little interest in the anniversary of the Great Purge.
