GRAVES, MASS.A major question for modern Russian society has
been the resting place for the victims of Joseph Stalin. Mass graves
are to be found at Kuropatyin Belarus and Bykivnia near Kiev, as
well as in western Siberia, Karelia, and at Kommunarka near
Moscow—to name only a few. A mass grave site at Butovo in
Moscow, now a Russian Orthodox Church property, holds more than
20,000 bodies of men and women shot in 1937 and 1938. Still, most
of the mass graves remain unknown and perhaps unknowable, as the
KGBdestroyed records that could implicate surviving officials, but
human rights group persist in documenting the extent of the Soviet
holocaust. As late as September 2002, the Russian human rights
group Memorialdiscovered a mass grave near St. Petersburg where
as many as 30,000 people are interred.
Mass graves exist at many former forced labor camps. Hundreds of
thousands perished from cold and overwork as well as execution.
According to gulag records, for example, 600,000 prisoners perished
in labor camps during World War II. Yet camp records are at best
sketchy and incomplete. Another problem facing the history of the
Soviet terror are the graves of those murdered by the security service
without any trial or judicial process. In 1939 Kira Kulik, the wife of
Marshal Kulik, was abducted by the NKVD, held at Lubyanka, and
then shot without interrogation or trial. Her crime was to have been
Stalin’s lover. She is but one of a host of people whose fate and final
resting place needs documentation. See alsoYEZHOVSHCHINA.GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR OF THE SOVIET UNION. The war
against Nazi Germany, known in the Soviet Union as the Great Pa-
triotic War, cost the Soviet people more than 27 million dead, of
whom almost 20 million were civilians. The war could not have been
won without the total victory of the Soviet intelligence and counter-
intelligenceservices over their Nazi enemy. But a proportion of the
losses were self-inflicted by the Soviet security service on the people
they protected in an effort to ensure the security of the rear area.
Joseph Stalinoften ignored good intelligence; his refusal to heed
intelligence about the forthcoming German assault was one of the
reasons for massive Soviet casualties in the opening battles of the
war. Nevertheless, Stalin and his subordinates in the military and in-
telligence services were able to use the NKVDand Smersh to defeat102 •GRAVES, MASS06-313 G-P.qxd 7/27/06 7:56 AM Page 102