Putin: no guilt for Stalin’s purges

RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin said no-one should try to make his nation feel guilty about one of the most notorious episodes of the Stalinist era — the so-called Great Purge of 1937 — saying that “in other countries even worse things happened”.

Speaking at a televised meeting with social studies teachers, Putin noted that this year is the 70th anniversary of a year that many Russians regard as a synonym for state-sponsored terror.

It is an anniversary that has, however, had relatively little attention in Russian media.