Mass graves in the Soviet Union

Mass graves in the Soviet Union

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, and reached their peak in the Great Purge 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 - containing an estimated 120,000 - 225,000 corpses

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

Butovo - over 20,000 confirmed killed

Sandarmokh - over 9,000 bodies discovered

Many other Stalin-era killing fields have been discovered,  one as recently as 2010. In the areas near Kiev alone, there are mass graves in Uman', Bila Tserkva, Cherkasy and Zhytomyr. Some were uncovered by the Germans during WWII; Katyn and Vinnitsa 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 "Red Terror" of 1918-21.

Operation Barbarossa and the mobile killing squads
On June 22, 1941, the German army invaded Soviet territory. German soldiers were very brutal in their dealings with the Soviets. Small units of SS and police, some three thousand men in all, were also dispatched to kill the unwanted individuals on the spot: Jews, communists, Gypsies, political leaders, and the intellectuals. 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 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 marched 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 pogroms were encouraged by the Wehrmacht, especially in Lithuania and Latvia. Before this phase of the killing ended, more than 1.2 million Jews were killed.