This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission.
Mass graves of victims of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s Great Purge campaign of the 1930s have been discovered in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINP) said over the weekend that 29 mass graves had been found on the territory of a site called Tatarka in the Black Sea port city of Odesa.
The graves were located after an Odesa-based historian, Oleksandr Babich, discovered documents in Romanian archives about mass executions and burials in Odesa in the 1930s.
According to the documents, the mass graves might stretch further to the territory of a nearby military unit.
At this point, work is being conducted to establish the exact number of men and women buried in the mass graves, but already historians are saying the site may be one of the largest of its kind in Ukraine.
There is no data on the exact number of Soviet citizens who became victims of Josef Stalin’s Great Purge. According to the Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow, at least 12 million innocent people were jailed or executed in the Soviet Union between the 1930s and 1950s.
The Gulag History Museum in the Russian capital says the number of such people was around 20 million, of whom more than 1 million were executed.
