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Katyn Memorial is situated 20 km awayfrom the center of Smolensk between villages Gnezdovo and Katyn, inso called Katyn Forest – in the place of awful events of the20s-40s of the twentieth century, victims of which were the citizensof two countries: the Soviet Union and Poland. Katyn Forest hasbecome the symbol of the suffering and doom of peoples in front ofatrocious power of totalitarianism.
On 28 July 2000 the opening of KatynNational Memorial Complex - the first in Russia internationalmonument in honour of the victims of the political arbitrariness ofthe Stalin government- took place. The sponsors of the constructionwere the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and theCouncil of Preserving Memory, Struggle and Martyrdom of Poland.
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There are remains of Polish officers in6 big fraternal graves and remains of generals B. Bogatyrevich and M.Smoravinsky in personal ones in the Polish military cemetery. Thealtar group consisting of an altar table, a wall with the names ofthe prisoners of Koselsk Camp, machine-gunned by troops of theMinistry for Home Affairs in April-May 1940, and a catholic crossrepresents a temple under the open sky. Katyn Bell, placed lowerthan the ground level, is supposed to remind about those who areburied there and serve as a warning for generations to come. Theformer places of burials are made in the form of cast-iron plateslike “pits of death.”
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Just in case you mistakenly heard that it was all ice and snow in Russia, take a peek at the Big Bikini Exposition. This is right on the river Moskva in Moscow!Moscow has been the capital of Russia for almost its entire history. The exception is during the period of the Russian Empire, which lasted from 1721 until the Russian Revolution 1917. For these two centuries the capital was St. Petersburg. The Russian Empire was the second largest contiguous Empire in world memory; only the Mongol Empire had been greater.Check out what's happening north of Mongolia these days, in ChitaAlthough you may not have heard of Sochi, on the Black Sea, they're building up quickly and hope to host the 2014 Olympics.Other periods of Russian history include the Tsardom of Russia, from Ivan IV to Peter the Great, and the Grand Duchy (14th-16th centuries).The earliest period of Russian history was ruled by the Novgorod Republic and Kievan Rus, which was the first Russian state dating back to 800AD in Kiev.Modern Russia remains one of the world's superpowers. They launched the earth's second satellite, called Sputnik 1, and were the first country to put a human being into orbit around earth. (The first one is called the Moon.)After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia became a federal republic of 83 states.Text by Steve Smith.
