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Memorial tablet unveiled at Kurapaty

A tablet commemorating 62 people executed by the NKVD in the late 1930s was unveiled on June 3 at Kurapaty, a Stalin-era massacre site just outside Minsk.

In the summer of 1988, archeologists Zyanon Paznyak, Mikola Kryvaltsevich and Aleh Iaw excavated the site, where about 180 people are thought to have been killed, historian Ihar Kuznyatsow said at the unveiling ceremony. “Owing to earlier exhumations, archeologists were able to find the remains of only 62 people,” Mr. Kuznyatsow said. “Resting in this common grave are grain growers, men and women slain in 1937 and 1938.”

The excavation work excited much public interest, Mr. Kuznyatsow said. “KGB officers in plain clothes, who, together with Belarusian literary greats Vasil Bykaw and Ales Adamovich, came up to the deep pit full of bones, said that Soviet people couldn’t possibly have done this,” he added.

Participants at the ceremony laid flowers at the memorial cross to which the tablet was attached, lit candles and sang Belarusian national revival songs.

In attendance were more than 30 people, including members of the Belarusian Voluntary Society for Historic and Cultural Heritage Protection, opposition youths, small business activists, and Stalinist terror survivors.

Prominent opposition politician Vyachaslaw Siwchyk was arrested at the beginning of the ceremony, which was being watched by more than 10 uniformed police officers and plainclothesmen. A man who said he was deputy chief of a district police department pledged his honor of an officer that Mr. Siwchyk would be brought back to Kurapaty, but that never occurred.

It was 20 years on June 3 since the publication of a newspaper article by Zyanon Paznyak and Yawhen Shmyhalyow that shed light on the Kurapaty executions.

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.