MOSCOW, March 6 (Reuters) - One of the top dancers at Russia's famed Bolshoi Theatre has confessed to plotting an acid attack that nearly blinded his artistic director Sergei Filin earlier this year, police were quoted as saying on Wednesday. Bolshoi soloist Pavel Dmitrichenko, who has played the evil villain in Swan Lake and the lead in Sergei Prokofiev's Ivan The Terrible, was detained on Tuesday, along with two other men, the RIA news agency quoted police as saying.

Russia on Tuesday marked the 60th anniversary of Joseph Stalin's death, with the nation divided about whether to view him as a tyrant who slaughtered millions or a saviour who helped turn the country into a global superpower after World War II. Hundreds of people laid red carnations at the Red Square grave of the Soviet ruler, where his body was buried in 1961 after being displayed for several years alongside Lenin in the Mausoleum.

We will shortly move the following features and focus pieces: + Descendants of Stalin officials bear witness in theatre show + Basketball girls back on 'Sharia Square' in Mali's Gao + Mission to save jaguar exposes big cats' plight in Brazil + Tough law sees acid conviction rate triple in Pakistan Russia-history-Stalin-theatre-USSR, FEATURE MOSCOW

No wall plaque honours the victims of Josef Stalin’s purges, who met their end in the execution cells of headquarters of the feared Soviet security services on Lubyanka Square in central Moscow. Instead the traffic races round a busy square and the building itself, known everywhere in Moscow as The Lubyanka, these days houses the Russian successor to the KGB, the FSB, as if the burden of history did not exist.