List of mass graves from Soviet mass executions
Graves of executed Soviet citizens and foreigners / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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In July 2010, a mass grave was discovered next to the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, containing the corpses of 80 military officers executed during the Red Terror of 1918–1921.[1] By 2013 a total of 156 bodies had been found in the same location.[2] At about the same time a mass grave from the Stalin period was discovered at the other end of the country in Vladivostok.[3]
These and later mass graves in the Soviet Union were used to conceal the large numbers of Soviet citizens and foreigners executed by the Bolshevik regime under Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.[4] Indiscriminate mass killings began in January 1918 during the Russian Civil War (1918–1922) as the Bolsheviks launched their Red Terror. After the upheavals of the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932) the killings reached a peak in the Great Purge of 1937–1938. At all times they were directed and carried out by the Soviet secret police under its changing titles: the Cheka during the Civil War, the OGPU during forced collectivisation of agriculture, and the NKVD during the Great Purge.