MOSCOW // Russia's parliament on Friday declared Stalin responsible for ordering the Katyn massacre of Polish officers in World War II, a crime Moscow spent decades blaming on the Nazis to the fury of Poland.
The resolution came amid reports that President Dmitry Medvedev was intending to launch a major new "de-Stalinisation" drive that reminded Russians of the Soviet dictator's crimes and declassified once-secret information.
The resolution of the State Duma lower house of parliament broke more than half a century of official reluctance to admit that Joseph Stalin and the Soviet leadership ordered the killing of thousands of Polish officers in 1940.
The document conceded that history could no longer be avoided and that it was time to lay waste to the myths spread by "official Soviet propaganda."
"Materials that for many years have been kept in secret archives and have now been published not only show the extent of this terrible tragedy but show that that Katyn crime was carried out on the direct orders of Stalin and other Soviet leaders," the declaration said.
The statement was agreed at an unusually stormy two-hour session that featured virulent opposition from the minority Communist Party -- whose leaders still say the massacre could have been committed by the Nazis.
"I do not understand how we can make conclusions ... based on German evidence and (Joseph) Goebbels's claims," said a furious top Communist Party official, Viktor Ilyukhin.
But pro-Kremlin lawmakers hailed the "historic" outcome and Polish officials welcomed the vote as a vital first step in advance of the Russian leader's bridge-building visit to Warsaw next month.
"This is a good step and an important sign," said Poland's parliament speaker Grzegorz Schetyna.
Poland's opposition icon Lech Walesa said his country "should welcome the fact that, little by little, these painful, difficult issues between Poland and Russia are being sorted out."
"It's moving forward slowly, but it's moving forward," Poland's PAP news agency quoted the country's first post-Soviet leader as saying.
About 22,000 Polish officers were executed by the NKVD secret police around the Katyn forest of western Russia one year after Soviet troops invaded Poland under a secret pact with Germany.
The Soviet Union initially blamed the massacre on the Nazis and Moscow's guilt was only admitted by Mikhail Gorbachev just before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990.
The crime was rarely again acknowledged in public until April 10 when a plane carrying Polish president Lech Kaczynski and a Polish official delegation, who were on their way to a memorial ceremony at Katyn, crashed and killed all on board. The tragedy brought a new rapprochement in Warsaw-Moscow ties.
Russia has since handed over 20 volumes of Katyn documents to Poland and officials said Medvedev would highlight the deadly role played by the NKVD when he launches a new drive to debunk the Soviet version of history next year.
"Will this project give an evaluation of specific organisations? Yes, I think so," the Kremlin's human rights envoy Yury Fedotov told Interfax.
Medvedev's campaign bears similarities to one launched in the 1950s by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev -- who not only denounced Stalin's cult of personality but even removed his body from Lenin's Mausoleum on Red Square.
News reports said that Medvedev would declassify all secret Soviet archives and the millions of case files compiled on regular civilians by the police.
But Katyn remains a particularly sensitive subject in Russia and the Duma took pains Friday to adopt language that also acknowledged the Soviet losses.
"Thousands of Soviet citizens destroyed by the Stalin regime in 1936-38 remain buried in the ditches of Katyn," said the Duma document.
"The technology of conducting mass murders was perfected on these people and then applied against the Polish servicemen at the same place," the statement added.
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Rating: 3/5
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Real estate tokenisation project
Dubai launched the pilot phase of its real estate tokenisation project last month.
The initiative focuses on converting real estate assets into digital tokens recorded on blockchain technology and helps in streamlining the process of buying, selling and investing, the Dubai Land Department said.
Dubai’s real estate tokenisation market is projected to reach Dh60 billion ($16.33 billion) by 2033, representing 7 per cent of the emirate’s total property transactions, according to the DLD.
The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
Yahya Al Ghassani's bio
Date of birth: April 18, 1998
Playing position: Winger
Clubs: 2015-2017 – Al Ahli Dubai; March-June 2018 – Paris FC; August – Al Wahda
Our legal columnist
Name: Yousef Al Bahar
Advocate at Al Bahar & Associate Advocates and Legal Consultants, established in 1994
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More than 2.2 million Indian tourists arrived in UAE in 2023
More than 3.5 million Indians reside in UAE
Indian tourists can make purchases in UAE using rupee accounts in India through QR-code-based UPI real-time payment systems
Indian residents in UAE can use their non-resident NRO and NRE accounts held in Indian banks linked to a UAE mobile number for UPI transactions
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Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
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Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
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Qalandars 112-4 (10 ovs)
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Qalandars win by six wickets
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The number of Chinese people living in Dubai: An estimated 200,000
Number of Chinese people in International City: Almost 50,000
Daily visitors to Dragon Mart in 2018/19: 120,000
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Percentage increase in visitors in eight years: 500 per cent