By Con Coughlin
Soaring oil prices have made the country a power again - but its ruler's grip on politics, the media and economy has sinister implications for democracy. Con Coughlin reports from Moscow   
Standing in the shadow of the Lubyanka, the notorious former KGB headquarters in central Moscow, a small group of elderly women are gathered around a large slab of granite that commemorates one of the darkest episodes in Russia's history.
The slab was taken from one of the Solovetsky punishment camps near Archangel on the White Sea, which formed what the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn described as the Gulag Archipelago, where the victims of Stalin's terror were sent to their deaths in their tens of thousands.
It has been placed outside the Lubyanka as a memorial to the millions of victims of state persecution and repression during the Soviet era. A neighbouring monument to Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the Bolshevik founder of the KGB, was unceremoniously torn down by an angry crowd of Muscovites shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s: all that now remains is a well-cut grass mound.
Wearing faded headscarves and threadbare coats to protect themselves from the bitter cold, the frail old ladies - some of them in their nineties - quietly intone their prayers for the dead, before placing small, neatly bound clusters of flowers around the granite slab.
advertisement"I'm still trying to find out what really happened to my grandfather," says Lyudmila, an 82-year-old grandmother who has travelled 500 miles to Moscow to mark Russia's official Memorial Day for Political Prisoners.
"They wanted him to work for the KGB, but when he refused they sent him off to the Gulags. He died of starvation, but apart from that we know very little."
Russian experts estimate that seven million people perished in the Gulags, and ordinary families are still struggling to come to terms with the horrors they suffered under the Soviet era.
Even Russian president Vladimir Putin, a former senior KGB officer, appears to understand the necessity of acknowledging the appalling repression of the Soviet era. Later in the day he would make his first visit to a memorial and church built at a site on the outskirts of Moscow where thousands of people were executed by firing squad.
This year is the 70th anniversary of Stalin's Great Terror. It is also an election year in Moscow, and ever-eager to consolidate his popularity (Putin has an 80 per cent approval rating), the Russian leader paid a fulsome tribute to the millions of victims.
"As a rule these were people with their own opinions," said Putin. "These were people who were not afraid to speak their mind. They were the most capable people. They were the pride of the nation. And, of course, over many years we still remember this tragedy. We need to do a great deal to ensure that this is never forgotten."
The implication, of course, was that nothing like this could happen in Putin's Russia, a truly democratic state where the rule of law is supreme.
Well, tell that to Mikhail Khordokovsky, the former oil tycoon who only six years ago had a personal fortune worth an estimated $10 billion (£4.8 billion). But then he made the cardinal error of publicly criticising Putin's decidedly autocratic style of government.
He now spends his days breaking rocks at a remote Siberian penal colony, where he is halfway through an eight-year jail term on what many of his supporters believe are politically motivated fraud charges.
The notion that Russia under Putin could return to the worst excesses of Comrade Stalin is, of course, far-fetched.
For a start, the Communist ideology that inspired the Bolsheviks to launch their class war against the governing and professional classes lies buried under the rubble of the Iron Curtain, so much so that the Communists will hardly feature in next month's parliamentary elections, which will in turn set the tone for next year's presidential election.
 Original Source