ZGram - 9/22/2002 - "Vast burial ground for thousands of victims of dictator Josef Stalin's firing squads"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

September 22, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

For one, they cannot blame the "Nazis"!  But watch the Jews claim 
this one, too!

[START]

September 21, 2002

Russian rights group finds mass-killings site

By Irina Titova

ASSOCIATED PRESS

      TOKSOVO, Russia - Diggers working to uncover the secrets of the 
collapsed Soviet Union say they have found 20 sets of bones in what 
they believe is a vast burial ground for thousands of victims of 
dictator Josef Stalin's firing squads

  So far, the volunteers from the human rights group Memorial have 
sent nine sets of remains to a forensic laboratory for tests of 
identifying features including age, sex, cause and time of death.

      Memorial will stop digging and declare the site a monument to 
the victims if the Federal Security Service, the main successor to 
the Soviet-era KGB, breaks its silence and confirms the area is part 
of the suspected Stalin-era mass grave, Memorial activist Irina Flige 
said.

      The work is grim in the forest outside Toksovo, about 20 miles 
northwest of St. Petersburg. With the sound of artillery shells 
exploding on a nearby army testing range, volunteer diggers stand 
waist-deep in pits, groping for bones with gloved hands.

      Volunteers working with Memorial searched for five years before 
finding the grave, which they estimate could contain about 30,000 
bodies in an area of about 500 acres. They have been digging here 
since last month.

      The only other known mass grave in the St. Petersburg area is 
believed to contain the remains of up to 8,500 people, according to 
drivers who brought the victims to the execution place in 1937-38, at 
the height of the Great Terror, as the purges and pogrom were called.

      The drivers were questioned by the KGB in 1965, during a time 
when Soviet authorities gingerly began to admit the massive scope of 
Stalin's crimes.

      Russian officials have said they believe millions of people died 
in the communist purges before Stalin's death in 1953.

      Yet there was no trace of tens of thousands of other victims who 
were rounded up in and around Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was known 
in Soviet times. According to official Soviet-era data, 39,488 
persons from the region were executed between Aug. 5, 1937, and Nov. 
16, 1938. Almost 7,000 people vanished from 1930 to 1936.

      Both the KGB and the Federal Security Service kept silent about 
where the victims were buried, so in the mid-1990s Memorial began 
publishing appeals for information in newspapers.

      The group was founded during perestroika to preserve the memory 
of the victims of political repression in the Soviet Union. It has 
since become one of Russia's most respected human rights groups.

      Witnesses who had lived in the villages around Toksovo in the 
1930s came forward, testifying that black trucks would make nightly 
visits to the artillery ground. The vehicles stood with their 
headlights on as shots rang out from the Rzhevsk testing range.

      "The range made this area very convenient for NKVD executions," 
said Miron Muzhdaba, one of Memorial's volunteer diggers, using the 
acronym for a precursor of the KGB. "They were to conduct the 
shooting as secretly as possible, so they hoped the testing would 
somehow hide the fact of real murders."

      Mr. Muzhdaba pointed to a bone pierced with a neat circle, and 
said it was the hole from a bullet shot into the nape of the neck - 
the classic execution method in Soviet Russia.

      "Most of the 20 skulls we've found here over the last month have 
similar holes in the same part of the neck," he said, adding that the 
bullet traces mostly matched .45-caliber Colt pistols, the type of 
gun carried by the Soviet secret police.

      Memorial has come across other, indirect evidence that indicates 
the approximately 30,000 missing victims were buried at the range. It 
includes official documents and aerial photos showing tire tracks in 
part of the Rzhevsk range, now overgrown with trees and shrubs.

      Anyone buried there could not have been killed by the Nazis 
because German forces did not reach this area in World War II, 
Memorial said.

      Many of the volunteers lost relatives in the Great Terror and 
said they were motivated in part by the desire to have a place to 
mourn.

      "I know how important it is for them to have a place where they 
can come and remember their dear ones," said Anna Reznikova, a 
graduate student.

      Mr. Muzhdaba said his great-grandfather was a priest who was 
executed in 1937. He may be buried in the marshy ground where the 
volunteers are digging, Mr. Muzhdaba said.

      "When we drive along the road leading to the range, I shiver 
sometimes," he said. "I can't imagine how it felt for the people in 
those trucks, realizing that they were on the way to their death."

=====

(Source: 

<http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020921-24166552.htm>http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020921-24166552.htm 
)