UKRAINE: Ukraine reburies 2,000 victims of Stalin's rule

About 2,000 people killed and put in mass graves by Soviet secret police in the Ukraine during the 1930s and 1940s are reburied. Ukraine on Saturday (October 27) reburied some 2,000 people killed by the Soviet secret police over several years up to World War Two and left in mass graves at a site near the capital, Kiev. The 1,998 bodies, 474 of which were Poles, were dug up earlier this year in the woods surrounding the village of Bykovna, on the outskirts of Kiev, where Ukrainian officials believe some 30,000 could have been buried during the 1930s and early 1940s. The mass graves were filled with bodies of people -- some estimate up to 100,000 -- who were tortured and shot by the dreaded NKVD, a precursor to the KGB, during Stalin's repressive and violent rule in the run up to the Russia's war with Nazi Germany. Polish historians and officials believe that several thousand Polish soldiers and officers who were captured as the Soviet Union encroached Polish lands to defeat the Nazis were buried there, including an estimated 15,000 massacred near the Katyn woods. Andrzej Przewoznik, general secretary of Poland's Council for the Protection of Monuments to Struggle and Martyrdom, said: "This is a very important place for Poles, because it is, we can say, the fourth place linked with Katyn. Apart from Katyn, Bidnoje, Karkov, where there are already Polish monuments to the war-time dead, this is the fourth place where there are remains of murdered Poles." Under Communist rule, the existence of mass graves filled with the victims of Stalin's rule was denied and it was only in the 1990s that it was acknowledged and a memorial was built. Maria Marzhetska, whose father was seized by the NKVD in 1937. She said for sixty years she did not know about his fate. She said: "He was shot in Kiev and buried here. Before, we did not know anything about it, we only learned about it ten years ago. I come here often, because you know, it is a big grief." In the sombre ceremony simple red coffins, some draped with flags, were lowered one by one into the ground and blessed by a priest. Relatives and officials prayed by their side.

ITN Source | October 28, 2007

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