Mass graves from Soviet mass executions

Mass graves in the Soviet Union were used for the burial of mass numbers of citizens and foreigners executed by the government of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.[1] These mass killings were carried out by the security organisations, such as the NKVD, and reached their peak in the Great Purge of 1937–38.

List of mass graves

Following the demise of the USSR in 1991, many of the killing and burial sites were uncovered,[2][3][4] one as recently as 2010.[5]

• Bykivnia Graves – containing an estimated 30,000[6]
• Kurapaty – At least 50,000 with considerably higher estimates in the Soviet press[7]
• Toksovo, near Saint Petersburg – 30,000 killed[8]
• Butovo – over 20,000 confirmed killed[9]
• Yekaterinburg – 18,000 executed and buried
• Kommunarka – approximately 10,000 killed[10]
• Sandarmokh – over 9,000 bodies discovered[11]
• Kolpashevo – over 1,000 bodies discovered in 1979, and then disposed of on instruction of the local party chief.[12]
• In the areas near Kiev alone, there are mass graves in Uman, Bila Tserkva, Cherkasy and Zhytomyr.[13]
• Katyn massacre
• Vinnytsia massacre – 9,432 corpses exhumed[14]
• In July 2010, a mass grave was discovered at the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, which contained the corpses of 80 military officers who were executed during the Bolshevik Red Terror of 1918–21.[15]
• Dem'ianiv Laz
• Augustów roundup

Gallery

• 
  Katyn 1943 exhumation. Photo taken by Polish Red Cross delegation.
• 
  Memorial cemetery Krasny Bor near Petrozavodsk, Russia
• 
  Butovo firing range near Moscow
• 
  Kuropaty mass grave site near Minsk, Belarus

See also

• Stalinist repressions in Mongolia
• NKVD prisoner massacres

References

1. "Documenting the Death Toll: Research into the Mass Murder of Foreigners in Moscow, 1937–38" By Barry McLoughlin, American Historical Association, 1999
2. "Mass grave found containing Stalin victims" Archived 1999-05-05 at the Wayback Machine LA Times-Washington Post News Service, July 13, 1997
3. "Mass grave found at Ukrainian monastery", BBC, July 12, 2002
4. "Wary of its past, Russia ignores mass grave site", by Fred Weir, The Christian Science Monitor, October 10, 2002
5. Stalin-era mass grave yields tons of bones Reuters. June 9, 2010
6. "Ukraine reburies 2,000 victims of Stalin's rule". Reuters. 27 October 2007
7. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment: 40th Anniversary Edition, Oxford University Press, US, 2007. p. 288
9. "Former Killing Ground Becomes Shrine to Stalin’s Victims" by Sophia Kishkovsky, The New York Times, June 8, 2007
10. Спецобъект "Монастырь" izvestia.ru.
11. "Pictorial essay: Death trenches bear witness to Stalin's purges" CNN, July 17, 1997
12. Hochschild, Adam. "The Secret of a Siberian River Bank". nytimes.com. New York Times. Retrieved 29 April 2016.
13. Hiroaki Kuromiya, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s. Yale University Press, December 24, 2007. ISBN 0-300-12389-2 p. 23
14. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment: 40th Anniversary Edition, Oxford University Press, US, 2007. p. 287
15. More 'red terror' remains found in Russia UPI, July 19, 2010.