Yury Luzhkov announced on Friday that he wanted the towering monument put back in Moscow's central Lubyanskaya Square where it was torn down by a crowd during the fall of Communism in 1991.

The Union of Rightist Forces (SPS), which was to hold a rally in Lubyanskaya Square on Monday, will start collecting a million signatures it hopes to send to the Moscow mayoralty to persuade it to reverse the decision.

"It's not a question whether the monument is a good or bad one. It's a symbol of a totalitarian era which did not end that long ago," SPS leader Boris Nemtsov said.

"Restoring such symbols may bring back totalitarianism. We could see censorship and the violation of democratic freedoms," added Nemtsov in comments released by his party.

The SPS leader, a former deputy prime minister under president Boris Yeltsin, will attend the protest meeting near a stone memorial to the Victims of Political Repression in the square.

According to Western historians, 15 to 30 million people died between 1918 and 1956 in the Gulag, the infamous forced labour camp system described by Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Memorial, the Russian human rights group, says 18 million people may have fallen victim to Stalinist repression, civil war, famines and collectivisation, although the true figure may never be known.

Speaking during a municipal meeting on city planning, Luzhkov said that he did not want "to bring back the past," but he considered that "the architectural and artistic composition of the sculpture is beyond reproach."

The statue, which stood outside the headquarters of the former KGB, founded by Dzerzhinsky and today known as the FSB, was "a very beautiful monument, which was a dominant feature of the Lubyanskaya Square," the mayor said.

In August 1991, the towering statue of "Iron Felix," was toppled by a crowd of 10,000 people in one of the defining moments of the fall of Communism, a few days after the failed putsch against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

The statue was not destroyed, but placed along with other monuments to Communist leaders in a park near the Central House of Artists by the Moskva river.

Dzerzhinsky, whose Cheka secret service was later renamed the KGB, led a bloody and pitiless crackdown against "counter-revolutionaries," targeting all political opponents of the Bolshevik regime.

Since the election in March 2000 of President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel who later headed the FSB, liberals have complained about the growing influence of the Russian secret services.

Under Putin, there have been a series of crackdowns on the independent media and a succession of espionnage trials that human rights activists say are creating a climate of fear.

hm/gk

Nampa-AFP WEB story ENDS (NAMPA 160925)

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