Russian youth orgs to commemorate wartime soldiers of various

MOSCOW, May 8 (Itar-Tass) - Russian youth organizations are beginning
a public action titled 'They Defended Their Homeland', as part of which
they will go to the streets of Moscow City and will hand out to the
passers-by many thousands of stickers with the names of heroes of World
War II of various nationalities that used to inhabit the former USSR.
The stickers are meant for being attached to car windows.
The action was initiated by the Russian Congress of Peoples of the
Caucasus /RKNK/ and the Multiethnic Russia Club.
"The names of heroes attached to the car windows will serve as
reminders of the fact that the soldiers of different ethnic origins - the
Russians, Yakuts, Kalmyks, Chechens, Karachais, Tatars and many others -
won a common victory without discriminating against anyone along ethnic
principles," the RKNK press secretary Asya Israilova said.
Sultan Togonidze, the chairman of the RKNK committee for the youth,
said hundreds of young people showed interest in the action virtually from
the very start of preparations for it.
"Today our society needs recognition of the unity of different peoples
as never before," he said. "Their representatives have made a huge
contribution in the past to our life today and we'll deserve entering the
future only if we develop awareness of this unity."
The heroes whose names are inscribed on the stickers "paid their lives
fighting shoulder to shoulder for truth and for our common homeland
regardless of their age, religious or ethnic identity," Togonidze said.
"Now we'd like to make the names of those heroes and the deeds the
that immortalized them known to as many people as possible."