Ceremony Held at Kurapaty to Commemorate Victims of Stalinist Terror

A few dozen people took part in a commemorative ceremony held at Kurapaty, a Stalin-era massacre site just outside Minsk, on March 29 to honor the memory of the victims of the Stalinist terror, BelaPAN said.

Participants laid flowers at memorial crosses, set up lighted candles, observed a minute of silence, and sang Belarusian national revival songs.

Police attempted to arrest a middle-age women who unfurled a white-red-white flag, but abandoned the idea after other participants actively interceded for her.

Researcher Ihar Kuznyatsow said at the ceremony that it would be very difficult now to determine the number of those who were executed and buried at Kurapaty, as many graves were bulldozed during the construction of the Minsk Beltway and a gas pipeline in the post-war period. He also said that it would be hard to identify those executed, as numerous purges of KGB records have most likely left no data about them.

Anton Astapovich, chairman of the Belarusian Voluntary Society for Historic and Cultural Heritage Protection, said that the local district police department had instituted criminal proceedings in connection with the most recent act of vandalism at Kurapaty.

On March 12, unidentified vandals damaged more than 30 memorial crosses, breaking some of them and bringing down others.

The Kurapaty memorial had been vandalized and defaced scores of times before, but not a single case had been solved.

Mr. Astapovich expressed hope that the police investigation would result in detecting the perpetrators and bringing them to justice. “Then the vandals will realize that not only civil society activists but also government authorities guard the memorial,” he said.

Thousands of people are believed to have been executed and buried by the NKVD (Soviet police) in the Kurapaty forest in the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s.

An investigation conducted from 1988 to 1995 established that the Kurapaty gravesite contained the remains of 220,000 to 250,000 people, who were identified as victims of Joseph Stalin's political terror.

In following years, the Belarusian authorities made attempts to contest the results of that investigation. A government commission revised downward the figure of victims at first to 30,000 people and then to 7,000.

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