Eight on trial in Estonia for Stalin-era crimes

Eight pensioners have gone on trial in Estonia for mass crimes against "enemies of the state" dating back to Stalin's purges. They are accused of organising the deportation of more than 400 people to the Siberian gulag in 1949.

The former Soviet states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which are on the brink of joining Nato, have vowed to punish anyone involved in the mass deportation of 40 million people under Stalin's rule. Russia has condemned the trials as vindictive punishments inflicted on old men, and has helped to fund their defence.

The trial of the eight defendants, aged between 75 and 81, began at a purpose-built court on Saaremaa island on Tuesday. The Red Army allegedly inflicted a series of war crimes upon Saaremaa's 40,000 inhabitants in 1944.

The former Soviet agents are accused of drawing up a list of 475 "enemies of the state" and sending them to the gulag.

"This trial is about justice, not revenge," said Henno Kuurmann, a spokesman for Estonian investigators who spent three years sifting through secret KGB files found in a cellar archive in Tallinn.

The former agents are expected to plead not guilty. They face a minimum of eight years in jail if convicted, or a life sentence.

The defendants are expected to claim that, at the time, their actions did not break any Soviet laws.

Three of the accused, Vladimir Kask, 76, Rudolf Sasask, 76, and Heino Laus, 75, were too ill to appear in court.

During Stalin's purges - which included torture, deportations and mass executions - some 20,000 Estonians were condemned to Siberian labour camps in March 1949 alone. Many of the victims were farmers and some were children whose parents had been targeted.

Deportees were sent on cattle trains and would endure months of sub-zero temperatures on the 1,200-mile journey.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose writing daringly exposed the horror of the gulag, said that at the end of such journeys survivors could make themselves known from the dead by climbing over the corpses of their companions.

The Estonian parliament declared last year that the deportation of "undesirables" under Stalin was a crime against humanity and should still be prosecuted, expediting this new trial.

Five former Soviet agents have been convicted in Estonia since the Baltic state gained independence in 1991. The only one to have been jailed died a year into his eight-year term.