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 June 17, 2000

Stalin Victims Memorial Dedicated

by SERGEI SHARGORODSKY Associated Press Writer

KHARKIV, Ukraine (AP) -- Amid crosses and flickering candles, the Polish and Ukrainian prime ministers on Saturday dedicated a memorial to the thousands killed by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's secret police 60 years ago.

"No words can describe this tragedy," Polish Prime Minister Jerzy Busek said at ceremonies at the Pyatikhatki Park cemetery, outside the Ukrainian city of Kharkhiv.

The cemetery is the resting place of some 7,000 Polish army officers and civilians executed in 1940 on orders from Stalin. After the Soviet Union occupied part of Poland, Stalin wanted to remove possible threats to Soviet control by killing academics, doctors, scientists, lawyers and others in positions of authority.

Thousands of Ukrainians, Russians and others executed under Stalin are also buried at the cemetery. Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union before it became independent in 1991.

Hundreds of mostly elderly Poles came to Saturday's ceremonies. They wandered amid tall Eastern Orthodox and Catholic crosses where the victims are buried in mass graves.

Many on Saturday knelt and wept, as they placed flowers, candles and small white-and-red Polish flags on metal plaques engraved with the names of the dead.

Historian Nina Lapchynska, who combed secret police archives in search of victims' names, said many of the Soviet dead remained unidentified. By contrast, many of the Poles had documents and other personal items on them when their remains were found in the early 1990s.

After the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939 under a pact with Nazi Germany, some 26,000 captured Polish officers were killed by the Soviet secret police. Some of the victims were taken to the Pyatikhatki forest clearing, while others were shot and buried in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, Russia.

The common graves in Katyn were discovered by the Nazis during World War II, and ever since have overshadowed the troubled Polish-Russian relationship. Only in 1990 did the Kremlin admit responsibility, but last year antagonized Poland by denying the 1939 invasion had been an act of aggression.

Relations between Poland and Ukraine have been more cordial, and the two countries agreed in 1998 to set up the Kharkhiv memorial. But there seemed to be little peace for the mourners who came Saturday.

Volodymyr Nastenko, an elderly Ukrainian, recalled waking up one night in 1938 and watching secret police agents take his father away. "I never saw my father again," Nastenko said. "He was slain in October, 1938."

Related file: "Katyn Forest Massacre. Polish deaths at Soviet hands"