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Mass Graves in Ukraine Hold Thousands of Victims of Stalin’s Great Purge
Smithsonian Magazine ^ | September 3, 2021 | Isis Davis-Marks

Posted on 09/05/2021 2:41:00 AM PDT by tlozo

Between 1936 and 1938, Stalin’s infamous secret police agency, the NKVD, waged a ruthless campaign of terror against high-ranking Communist Party officials and ordinary citizens alike. Estimates of the death toll vary, but History.com points out that at least 750,000 people were executed during the Great Purge (also known as the Great Terror). Millions more were detained in the Gulag, a vast system of forced labor and prison camps.

At the site in Odessa, Stalin’s enforcers “dug out pits in the garbage and threw these people in or shot them dead as they were standing there,” archaeologist Tetyana Samoylova tells Agence France-Presse (AFP). “And then they covered them with the same garbage.”

Identifying the remains may prove impossible, as official records from that period are classified and held in Moscow.

“These documents will never be handed over to us under the current government in Russia,” says Sergiy Gutsalyuk, head of the local branch of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINP), in a separate AFP report.

Per BBC News, the Soviet secret police sentenced around 8,600 people in Odessa to death between 1938 and 1941 alone. The devastation wrought by the Great Purge followed close on the heels of another atrocity: the Holodomor, a humanmade famine that killed an estimated 3.9 million Ukrainians between 1932 and 1933.

“[U]nlike other famines in history caused by blight or drought, this [one happened] when a dictator wanted both to replace Ukraine’s small farms with state-run collectives and punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to his totalitarian authority,” wrote Patrick J. Kiger for History.com in 2019.

Per a UINP statement, archival research conducted by Odessa-based historian Aleksander Babich suggests the newly discovered burials extend beyond the landfill to an area owned by a military unit. Other mass graves have been found in the region previously: Between 1937 and 1941, for instance, Stalin’s secret police buried tens of thousands in Bykivnia, a village on the outskirts of Kiev. The mass grave’s existence was denied by authorities until the 1990s, when Ukraine built a memorial at the site. In 2007, officials reburied 1,998 of the victims interred at Bykivnia in a “somber” ceremony, as Reuters reported at the time.

“When we carry out the exhumation, we will decide what to do here,” Odessa’s mayor, Gennady Trukhanov, tells AFP. “And, of course, we plan to make a memorial.


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Foreign Affairs; Russia; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: holodomor; russia; stalin; ukraine; waronterror
In the late 1930s, the Soviet secret police buried some 5,000 to 8,000 people at a newly excavated site in Odessa, Ukraine.
1 posted on 09/05/2021 2:41:00 AM PDT by tlozo
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To: tlozo

The fruit of communism


2 posted on 09/05/2021 2:49:25 AM PDT by xp38
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To: tlozo

But remember, the left would never dream of doing something like this here.

/s


3 posted on 09/05/2021 2:49:33 AM PDT by TheConservator (Beware the tyranny of the woke mob. There has never been a greater threat to liberty.)
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To: tlozo

I have been watching a documentary on WWII. The death counts are simply staggering. Incomprehensible. And yet this wasn’t the end of the world.

A more deadly battle called Armageddon awaits in the future, forcasting “rivers of blood” which will be worse than WWII. That’s a sobering thought.

Someone in the future may some day encounter a mass burial site and think “oh, that’s not so many”. This is why evil must be challenged and defeated.


4 posted on 09/05/2021 3:51:02 AM PDT by OrangeHoof (Chinese communism will look different once the masks come off.)
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To: tlozo

Holodomor
The Ukrainian Genocide
https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/educator-resources-opportunities/resources/holodomor

Share the Story (long list of brief statements by survivors)
Commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Holodomor
http://www.sharethestory.ca/


5 posted on 09/05/2021 3:59:32 AM PDT by Texas Fossil ((Texas is not where you were born, but a Free State of Heart, Mind & Attitude!))
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To: tlozo

2nd amendment ping. The democrat taliban party wants to repeat this massacre today against us.


6 posted on 09/05/2021 4:15:14 AM PDT by joma89 (Buy weapons and ammo, folks, and have the will to use them.)
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To: NFHale

Uke Ping.

Woof!


7 posted on 09/05/2021 5:34:14 AM PDT by DuncanWaring (The Lord uses the good ones; the bad ones use the Lord.)
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To: xp38

“The fruit of communism”
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Good Post xp38. Wonderful Bio too !


8 posted on 09/05/2021 5:40:53 AM PDT by InkStone (Omni Vivum Ex Surfboard)
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To: Texas Fossil

There’s a memorial for the Holodomor to the left of the entrance of St. Michael’s Cathedral in Kyiv, in the same square abutted by the Intercontinental Hotel.


9 posted on 09/05/2021 6:20:25 AM PDT by The Truth Will Make You Free
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To: TheConservator

That is because they have Google (Alphabet/CCP) to show them how to implement communism “correctly”.
See, this generation of SJW’s are much more intelligent than any previous. Their professors told them so.


10 posted on 09/05/2021 6:20:27 AM PDT by bobbo666 (Baizuo, WuhanFlu)
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To: The Truth Will Make You Free

It should always be remembered. And the world should become aware of the reality of it.

Unfortunately, it was a long time ago. But it is still important to Ukrainians. The Russian bear has noticed the changes inside the USA.

We must react against our betrayal here.


11 posted on 09/05/2021 7:31:10 AM PDT by Texas Fossil ((Texas is not where you were born, but a Free State of Heart, Mind & Attitude!))
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To: tlozo

Yet the NY Times’ Walter Duranty and today’s revisionists are saying it never happened.

What are you going to believe? The NY Times or your own lying eyes?

I have an old TV series from forty years ago, THE UNKNOWN WAR, narrated by Burt Lancaster, about the Soviet fight against the Nazis.

When it came to the Katyn Massacre, Lancaster says it was done by the Nazis, yet after the fall of the Communists the Russians released info showing it was the NKVD that did the massacre.


12 posted on 09/05/2021 7:52:12 AM PDT by Ruy Dias de Bivar (OUT OF FB JAIL! and back on the attack. 4 hours! Now back in FB jail-again!)
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To: xp38

The Holodomor killed closer to 10,000,000 Ukrainian people.


13 posted on 09/05/2021 2:39:33 PM PDT by Jimmy Valentine (DemocRATS - when they speak, they lie; when they are silent, they are stealing the American Dreams)
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To: DuncanWaring

Woof, brother…

In a better world, those mass graves would’ve been filled with thousands of Stalin’s commie thugs.

That’s what happens when you let yourself be disarmed… And let me tell you, that shit ain’t going to be happening here.


14 posted on 09/05/2021 4:42:26 PM PDT by NFHale (The Second Amendment - By Any Means Necessary.She was, indeed, a hottie… Rest in peace, Joanne.)
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To: bobbo666; Texas Fossil; OrangeHoof

Someone should tell the “millenial” SJW techno Apparatchik neo Socialists college punk generations who are “so much more intelligent” (as to not know HOW they will end up if they are successful) — tell them WHOSE role they will be recruited for in the REPEAT of the Holodomor the World Communists want to carry out... the very necessary murder of millions of people to get them out of the way-— (all to prevent “climate change” of course).

Tell them about the NKVD, the KGB about the psychopath STALIN and the 20 plus million of his own country he murdered. And that the new tech tyrants have absolutely no problem with eliminating our population (for the greater good, and theirs as well. See Bill Gates). Vaccine passports— passports to cross into another State! All of the apparat to do this are IN our federal government under Biden... right now. Names: Mayorkas, Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken... and all of the Susan Rice biotches who were obamaumao’s loyal cadre.

Here is one of the most instructional of the Vimeo videos of real survivors of Holodomor (watched all of them- Thanks Texas Fossil)... Valerian’s Story (Valerian was a mechanical student at the Soviet school in Kiev)- what the Commies did to him:

https://vimeo.com/77081192


15 posted on 09/05/2021 4:43:19 PM PDT by John S Mosby (Sic Semper Tyrannis)
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To: Jimmy Valentine

I have heard 7 million as the high but, as more information becomes available, the numbers rise. There were also government induced famines along the Volga and in Central Asia in the ‘30s. Add to this, 15 million who died in the Russian revolution and civil war, 2-3 million who died after the civil war in the famine of 1921-22. (More would have except the American Relief Aadministration sent food and organized meals for the Russians) And the latest figure of 28 million dead during The Great Patriotic War.
Studying Russian history is depressing.


16 posted on 09/05/2021 5:46:42 PM PDT by bravo whiskey (Count Rostov "The tyranny of indistinguishable days.")
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To: John S Mosby

thank you.


17 posted on 09/05/2021 6:09:49 PM PDT by Texas Fossil ((Texas is not where you were born, but a Free State of Heart, Mind & Attitude!))
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To: Nailbiter

for later read


18 posted on 09/05/2021 6:34:29 PM PDT by Nailbiter
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To: Jimmy Valentine

The almost 4 million figure is probably more recent, and so may be more researched. Still, a lot of people died. That is not disputed.


19 posted on 09/05/2021 6:59:55 PM PDT by Jacob Kell
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To: bravo whiskey

Depressing indeed. In Crimea there is a war memorial near Balaclava. Sits on a hill with a monument at the top. As you go along looking at exhibits, it dawns on you that the hill is a mass grave.


20 posted on 09/06/2021 1:31:12 AM PDT by Jimmy Valentine (DemocRATS - when they speak, they lie; when they are silent, they are stealing the American Dreams)
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