The World - News from Dec. 28, 1988

Leading Soviet liberal intellectuals criticized a decision by the Culture Ministry to hold a contest to design a memorial to the victims of the Stalin era without consulting the group that originated the idea. The Memorial group--which includes physicist Andrei D. Sakharov and historian Roy Medvedev--began collecting signatures a year ago calling for a library, an archives center and other projects devoted to the memory of Josef Stalin’s victims. But the ministry’s project calls for only a single monument in Moscow, and the only sponsors listed are official artistic unions and the Moscow city government. “This sounds to me like a general strike at our movement,” poet and Memorial member Yevgeny Yevtushenko said.