Stalin

Two Croatian NGOs, the Ante Zemljar association and Documenta - Centre for Dealing with the Past, held a commemorative event on Tuesday to mark the 70th anniversary of the arrival of the first prisoners on Goli Otok (Naked Island) in the Adriatic Sea off Croatia's northern coast.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is urging people to carefully weigh their votes in the upcoming EU elections as polls show that populist and nationalist parties could gain ground.

Juncker said Tuesday that voters should ask themselves what the "European landscape" would look like in the coming years if everyone voted for extremists.

(MENAFN - The Conversation) Decades after the fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, Soviet World War II monuments continue to arouse significant controversy in many former Eastern Bloc countries where they are either being dismantled by law or vandalised by activists.

The images of Bulgarian national heroes and political leaders appear on mugs and fridge magnets next to those of Stalin, Hitler and Communist leader Todor Zhivkov on vendors’ stalls around the country.

All official institutions in Moldova lowered the national flag on Friday in a mark of respect for the victims of the second and biggest wave of deportations from Soviet-occupied Bessarabia that Stalin ordered on the night between June 5-6, 1949.

Historian and former senior official of the SFR Yugoslavia Latinka Perovic said that the anniversary of the Informbiro Resolution is not talked about in Serbia today and that this is not at a coincidence at all primarily because of Russia's role in Serbia.

A previous version of this interview, published April 2, contained several substantial phrasing errors, now corrected.

 The Parliament approved the request from Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) to dismiss Valeri Zhablyanov as Deputy President of the Parliament, BNT reports. The proposal was adopted with 110 to 71 votes.

By James George Jatras*

Every living nation needs symbols. They tell us who we are as one people, in what we believe, and on what basis we organize our common life.

Despite the backlash caused by the refusal of the Greek government to take part in a conference on August 23 in Estonia focusing on crimes committed by communist regimes in the 21st Century titled “The Heritage in 21st Century Europe of the Crimes Committed by Communist Regimes”, leftist SYRIZA party doubled down on the decision praising Justice Minister Stavros Kontonis for his stance.