About 1,000 people have taken part in an opposition-led march in the Belarus' capital to commemorate the victims of Stalinist purges, the Associated Press reported.
Police have allowed Sunday's annual march to proceed peacefully. The opposition is comparing the Stalinist-era repressions to the current authoritarian government of President Alexander Lukashenko.
Opposition leader Viktor Ivashkevich says "Belarus is once again going through a period of stifling dictatorship, which has its roots in the Stalinist repressions."
The demonstrators have marched from central Minsk to Kurpaty, a site of Soviet-era mass executions on the
outskirts of the capital. Tens of thousands of people were shot here in the late 1930s and early 1940s.