Mass graves in the Soviet Union
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This page discusses mass graves in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

.

Soviet repression and terror

The government of the USSR under Stalin murdered many of its own citizens and foreigners. These mass killings were carried out by the security organisations, such as the NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....

, and reached their peak in the Great Purge
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...

 of 1937-38, when nearly 700,000 were executed by a shot to the base of the skull. Following the demise of the USSR in 1991, many of the killing and burial sites were uncovered. Some of the more notable mass graves include:

Bykivnia
Bykivnia
Bykivnia is a former small village on the outskirts of Kiev, Ukraine, that was incorporated into the city in 1923. It is known for the National Historic-Memorial Reserve "Bykivnia Graves"....

 - containing an estimated 120,000 - 225,000 corpses

Kurapaty
Kurapaty
Kurapaty is a wooded area on the outskirts of Minsk, Belarus, in which a vast number of people were executed between 1937 and 1941 by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.The exact count of victims is uncertain, NKVD archives are classified in Belarus...

  - estimations range from 30,000 to 200,000 bodies found

Butovo
Butovo firing range
The Butovo firing range is the name of a location where more than 20,000 political prisoners were shot during the Great Terror of the Soviet Union and thereafter from 1938 to 1953. It is located in the Yuzhnoye Butovo District of Moscow, near the village of Drozhzhino...

 - over 20,000 confirmed killed

Sandarmokh
Sandarmokh
Sandarmokh is a forest massif in Medvezhyegorsky District, Karelia, Russia, a burial site of victims of Soviet political repressions, where over 9,000 bodies were discovered after the place was found in 1997 by members of the Memorial Society....

 - over 9,000 bodies discovered

Many other Stalin-era killing fields have been discovered, one as recently as 2010. In the areas near Kiev
Kiev
Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....

 alone, there are mass graves in Uman', Bila Tserkva
Bila Tserkva
Bila Tserkva is a city located on the Ros' River in the Kiev Oblast in central Ukraine, approximately south of the capital, Kiev. Population 203,300 Area 34 km².-Administrative status:...

, Cherkasy
Cherkasy
Cherkasy or Cherkassy , is a city in central Ukraine. It is the capital of the Cherkasy Oblast , as well as the administrative center of the surrounding Cherkasky Raion within the oblast...

 and Zhytomyr
Zhytomyr
Zhytomyr is a city in the North of the western half of Ukraine. It is the administrative center of the Zhytomyr Oblast , as well as the administrative center of the surrounding Zhytomyr Raion...

. Some were uncovered by the Germans during World War II; Katyn
Katyn massacre
The Katyn massacre, also known as the Katyn Forest massacre , was a mass execution of Polish nationals carried out by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs , the Soviet secret police, in April and May 1940. The massacre was prompted by Lavrentiy Beria's proposal to execute all members of...

 and Vinnitsa
Vinnytsia massacre
The Vinnytsia massacre was a mass execution of people in the Ukrainian town of Vinnytsia by the Soviet secret police NKVD during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge in 1937–1938. Mass graves in Vinnytsia were discovered during the German occupation of Ukraine in 1943...

 being the most infamous

In July 2010, a mass grave was discovered at St. Petersburg which contained the corpses of 80 military officers executed during the Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....

 "Red Terror
Red Terror
The Red Terror in Soviet Russia was the campaign of mass arrests and executions conducted by the Bolshevik government. In Soviet historiography, the Red Terror is described as having been officially announced on September 2, 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov and ended about October 1918...

" of 1918-21.

Operation Barbarossa and the mobile killing squads

On June 22, 1941, the German
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

 army invaded Soviet territory. German soldiers were very brutal in their dealings with the Soviets. Small units of SS and police
Police
The police is a personification of the state designated to put in practice the enforced law, protect property and reduce civil disorder in civilian matters. Their powers include the legitimized use of force...

, some three thousand men in all, were also dispatched to kill the unwanted individuals on the spot: Jews, communists, Gypsies, political leaders, and the intellectual
Intellectual
An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...

s. Almost 90% of the Jews were urbanized, living in large cities where the rapid advance of the army and the swift action of the mobile killing units
Einsatzgruppen
Einsatzgruppen were SS paramilitary death squads that were responsible for mass killings, typically by shooting, of Jews in particular, but also significant numbers of other population groups and political categories...

 left them unaware of their fate, paralyzed, unable to act. There were five stages to the killing. The invasion was followed immediately by the roundup of the intended victims. Those rounded up were march
Marching
See also: Loaded marchMarching refers to the organized, uniformed, steady and rhythmic walking forward, usually associated with military troops.Marching is often performed to march music, and often associated with military parades....

ed to the outskirts of the city where they were shot. Their bodies were buried in mass graves - large ditches were filled with bodies or people who had been shot one by one and buried in mass graves. The residents of these cities could see what was happening. They could hear the shots and the victim's cries. Most often, they remained neutral, neither helping the killer nor offering solace to the victim. Frequently, local pogrom
Pogrom
A pogrom is a form of violent riot, a mob attack directed against a minority group, and characterized by killings and destruction of their homes and properties, businesses, and religious centres...

s were encouraged by the Wehrmacht
Wehrmacht
The Wehrmacht – from , to defend and , the might/power) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the Heer , the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe .-Origin and use of the term:...

, especially in Lithuania
Lithuania
Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...

 and Latvia
Latvia
Latvia , officially the Republic of Latvia , is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia , to the south by Lithuania , to the east by the Russian Federation , to the southeast by Belarus and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden...

. Before this phase of the killing ended, more than 1.2 million Jews were killed.

See also

  • Stalinist repressions in Mongolia
  • NKVD prisoner massacres
  • Dem'ianiv Laz
    Dem'ianiv Laz
    Dem'ianiv Laz is a mass burial site of victims of NKVD executions committed in the wake of the German occupation of Stanisławów , Ukraine in 1941...

  • Babi Yar
    Babi Yar
    Babi Yar is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kiev and a site of a series of massacres carried out by the Nazis during their campaign against the Soviet Union. The most notorious and the best documented of these massacres took place on September 29–30, 1941, wherein 33,771 Jews were killed in a...

  • Drobitsky Yar
    Drobitsky Yar
    Drobytsky Yar is a ravine 8–12 km south east from Kharkiv, Ukraine. In December 1941, Nazi troops invading the Soviet Union began killing local inhabitants over the following year. At the end of this period, some 16,000 people, mainly Jews were killed. Notably on December 15, 1941, when the...

  • Odessa massacre
    Odessa massacre
    The Odessa massacre was the extermination of Jews in Odessa and surrounding towns in Transnistria during the autumn of 1941 and the winter of 1942 in a series of massacres and killings during the Holocaust by Romanian forces, under German control, encouragement and instruction...

  • Ponary massacre
    Ponary massacre
    The Ponary massacre was the mass-murder of 100,000 people, mostly Polish Jews, by German SD and SS and Lithuanian Nazi collaborators Sonderkommando collaborators...

  • Rumbula massacre
    Rumbula massacre
    The Rumbula massacre was the two-day killing of about 25,000 Jews in and on the way to Rumbula forest near Riga, Latvia, during the Holocaust. Save only the Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine, this was the biggest two-day Holocaust atrocity until the operation of the death camps...

  • Simferopol
    Simferopol
    -Russian Empire and Civil War:The city was renamed Simferopol in 1784 after the annexation of the Crimean Khanate to the Russian Empire by Catherine II of Russia. The name Simferopol is derived from the Greek, Συμφερόπολις , translated as "the city of usefulness." In 1802, Simferopol became the...

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