Soviet Union's past remains buried

[jamesinca]

Soviet Union's past remains buried
Human rights group trying to uncover full truth behind Stalin's bloody reign

Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, August 22, 2003

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Rzhevsky Artillery Range, Russia -- They killed them effortlessly, in the signature style of Josef Stalin's dreaded NKVD secret police: one .45 Colt bullet to the back of the skull, the bullet's exit shattering the facial bones.

Then, haphazardly, the executioners buried their victims in mass graves, barely disguising their remains under a foot of sagging, sandy soil -- year after year, body after broken body.

As Stalin's paranoid purges of the 1930s swept across Russia, NKVD henchmen killed as many as 32,000 Soviet men, women and children at this place in a decade's time, the Russian human rights group Memorial estimates, based on the testimony of witnesses and written accounts.

They dropped them into shallow unmarked pits at the Rzhevsky artillery range near Toksovo, 20 miles north of St. Petersburg, and left them here to rot, nameless and forgotten.


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Historians believe that anywhere from a million to 20 million people were executed without trial or perished in the deadly labor camps of the Soviet gulag. In 1937-38, at the height of the purges, as many as 40,000 residents of St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad, were put to death.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/08/22/MN258518.DTL