Joseph Stalin's era mass grave found in Ukraine

[JustJohn or JJ]

Joseph Stalin's era mass grave found in Ukraine

Thousands of people are believed to be buried at this site, one of the largest ever found in Ukraine. The remains of 5,000 to 8,000 people have been found in 29 graves in the southern city of Odessa. The site, believed to be from the late 1930s, was discovered during research for a planned airport expansion. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians died during Joseph Stalin's rule in the Soviet Union.

Sergei Gutsalyuk, head of the regional department of Ukraine's National Memorial Institute, told that the victims were probably killed by units of the Soviet secret police in the late 1930s. However, it is not possible to identify the victims because records are kept in Russia. According to the Ukrinform website, some 8,600 people were sentenced to death by the Soviet secret police in Odessa between 1938 and 1941. The National Institute of Remembrance initially said it could not quantify the number of executions, but now it appears to be one of the largest mass graves ever found in Ukraine.

One of the historians who worked on the find, Alexander Babic, said that there would likely be more bodies than had been found because excavations were ongoing in some parts of the site. He added that there may be graves of other military units nearby. Ukrainian historians say that hundreds of thousands of people were killed during the brutal suppression of Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. Other mass graves were found in Odessa and elsewhere in Ukraine.

One of the largest sites is at Bikovnya, a forest outside the capital Kiev, where it is estimated that more than 200,000 executed political prisoners may have been buried. Millions of Ukrainians also died during the Stalin famine of 1932-1933, which some in Ukraine described as genocide by the Soviet leadership - although Russia denied it.
26/8/21