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Duma deputies opposed to McCartney concert on Red Square

MOSCOW. May 13 (Interfax) - A group of Duma deputies has urged Sir Paul McCartney and Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov to move the ex-Beatle's concert, due on Moscow's Red Square on May 24, in a different place.

"We find it absolutely senseless and blasphemous to hold rock concerts in a graveyard of a special kind where Stalin, Lenin, Brezhnev, Gagarin and other prominent personalities are buried," says a message obtained by Interfax on Tuesday and signed by Alexei Mitrofanov, Nikolai Bezborodov, Sergei Reshulsky, Tatyana Astrakhankina, Yuri Nikiforenko and others.

"A rock concert on Red Square has a covert political meaning and would require the use of a significant number of police and security forces," the message says.

"You may find yourself in the very center of a serious political scandal," the deputies warned McCartney.

In a separate message to Luzhkov, they reminded him that at a Duma session on April 18 this year, 181 deputies protested against the decision to hold the concert in Red Square and suggested considering holding it in a different place in Moscow.