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Moscow’s NKVD restaurant drew social media protests and the letters on the big sign with its name outside have been removed.

The name of the restaurant is a chilling echo of the Stalin-era communist terror. The NKVD was the forerunner of the Soviet KGB secret police. In the 1930s and 1940s the NKVD arrested millions of people and many were executed.

The restaurant also sports a big portrait of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Stalin’s image also featured on the restaurant’s menus.

Image source Twitter

Image source Twitter

NKVD restaurant is not far from the Kremlin and the old secret police headquarters, on Ostozhenka Street.

The controversy over the “NKVD” name featured in Russian Vesti TV news – one of the main broadcasts on the state-controlled Rossiya 24 channel.

However, some Russians voiced alarm at what appeared to be more whitewashing of history and an insult to Stalin’s many victims.

Public displays of Stalin portraits were taboo in the last decades of the Soviet Union – but they have reappeared during President Vladimir Putin era.

Vladimir Putin has emphasized the sacrifices made by the USSR in World War Two. But he has also acknowledged that Joseph Stalin’s security apparatus committed terrible crimes.

Leonid Gozman, of the Russian civil society organization, Perspektiva Foundation, said “it’s a rehabilitation of our country’s most tragic episodes.

“I can’t imagine a <<Gestapo>> restaurant in Munich or Berlin… A lot of our people consider the NKVD to have been a criminal organization. Many people’s relatives suffered or died [in that period].”

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Turkish sources claim that the three men who carried out the deadly attack on Istanbul’s Ataturk airport on June 28 were all from parts of the former USSR.

One is said to be from Russia’s North Caucasus region and the others from Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Turkey believes ISIS was behind the suicide gun and bomb attack that left 44 people dead and some 240 injured.

Meanwhile, Turkish police detained at least 13 suspects in Istanbul and more in Izmir on June 30.

One image on Turkish media purported to show the three men together at the airport moments before the attack, wearing dark jackets and carrying hold alls. Two are wearing caps, one is smiling.Istanbul airport attackers USSR

An unnamed Turkish official confirmed for Reuters news agency the dead attackers’ countries of origin after Turkish media reports.

Some agencies named one of the men as Osman Vadinov, said to have crossed into Turkey from the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa in Syria in 2015.

Reports that Osman Vadinov was a Chechen have been denied by an unnamed police source in the North Caucasus, Russia’s Interfax news agency reports.

The organizer of the attack has been named by Turkish media as Akhmed Chatayev, a Chechen believed to have acted as an ISIS recruiter, who is on a US counter-terror sanctions list. His fate was not immediately clear.

ISIS has long recruited members from mainly Muslim parts of the former USSR, with Russian President Vladimir Putin putting the overall number at between 5,000 and 7,000 in October.

However, data published by the Soufan Group security consultants in December suggests the numbers are lower: 2,400 from Russia and 500 apiece from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Turkey’s government has made no official statement on nationalities yet and no-one has said they carried out the attack on June 28.

PM Binali Yildirim said on June 29 that “our thoughts on those responsible for the attack lean towards Islamic State”.

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