Mass graves of the victims of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s Great Purge have been found in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINP) said on Aug. 22.
The UINP announced that 29 mass graves containing gunshot victims have been found at a site called Tatarka, once belonging to the former People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). The site is located in Odesa, a Black Sea port city of about 1 million people, 475 kilometers south of Kyiv.
The graves were discovered after Oleksandr Babich, an Odesa-based historian, found archive documents about mass executions and burials in Odesa.
According to these documents, the graves may extend all the way to the territory of a nearby military unit, making it the largest mass burial site of its kind in the country.
“We can only guess with what blood Soviet power had been imposed in Odesa,” the UINP said.
The Great Purge was a major campaign of arrests, political repression, ethnic cleansing and mass executions that took place in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s.
While the total number of victims is unknown, the Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow reports that at least 12 million USSR citizens were jailed or executed in the Soviet Union between the 1930s and 1950s.
The Gulag History Museum in Moscow states that there were around 20 million victims during this period of whom more than 1 million were executed.
In the 1930s, the Soviet Union also inflicted a genocide called Holodomor on Ukraine. Millions of Ukrainians starved to death, while many more were hit with crippling birth defects from malnutrition.
