From the BBC:
“Stalin-era mass grave found
in Ukraine”
(Site of the mass grave in Odessa)
What may be one of Ukraine's
largest Stalin-era mass graves has been identified by researchers. The remains
of between 5,000 and 8,000 people were found in 29 graves in the southern city
of Odessa. The site, believed to date back to the late 1930s, was uncovered
during exploration works for a planned expansion of an airport. Hundreds of
thousands of Ukrainians are believed to have died during Joseph Stalin's rule
of the Soviet Union. Sergiy Gutsalyuk, the head of the regional branch of
Ukraine's National Memory Institute, told AFP that the victims were likely to
have been killed by the Soviet secret police unit during the late 1930s. However,
he said it would not be possible to identify the victims as any records were
held in Russia. According to the Ukrinform website, around 8,600 people in
Odessa were sentenced to death by the Soviet secret police between 1938 and
1941.
The National Memory Institute had
initially said it was not possible to estimate the number of people executed at
the site, but that it already appeared to be one of the largest mass graves
ever found in Ukraine. One of the historians who worked on the discovery,
Aleksander Babich, said on Facebook that there were likely to be even more
bodies than had already been found, as excavations had not been completed in
some parts of the site. He added that there could also be further graves on a
nearby site belonging to a military unit. Ukrainian historians say that
hundreds of thousands of people were killed during Joseph Stalin's violent
repression of the 1930s, with other mass graves found in Odessa and elsewhere
in Ukraine.
(Bykivnia, another mass grave
site, lies near the Ukrainian capital Kyiv)
One of the largest sites is at
Bykivnia, a forest outside the capital Kyiv, where some estimates say that more
than 200,000 executed political prisoners may have been buried. Millions of
Ukrainians also died during a Stalin-era famine from 1932-1933, which some in
Ukraine believe was an act of genocide carried out by the Soviet leader -
although Russia denies this.
^ Sadly, all of Eastern Europe
(especially the former Soviet Union) is soaked with the blood of men, woman and
children murdered by the Communists. ^
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