Ceremony pays tribute to Russian émigrés kidnapped by Soviet secret police

President Vaclav Klaus and other state officials have paid tribute to the thousands of Russian and Ukrainian émigrés who found refuge in Czechoslovakia after 1917 but were abducted by the Soviet secret police and imprisoned in Soviet labour camps in the 1940s. The short ceremony held at an orthodox Christian cemetery in Prague on Friday morning was also attended by the victims' descendants. The illegal abductions of the Russian émigrés - who were Czechoslovak citizens - began as soon as the Red Army began to liberate Czechoslovakia in 1944, and continued long after the Soviets arrived in Prague in May 1945.