"Under the Sign of Scorpion" by Juri - Gnostic Liberation Front

some earth on the bodies. The corpses were always naked. They all had
bullet holes in their heads; a small entry hole in the back of the neck and
large exit hole in front. They had been shot from behind.
The executioners had an unlimited supply of alcohol. They were usually
drunk, sometimes extremely. Vodka was consumed during and after work.
The KGB admitted in July 1990 that there were also mass graves in the
Donskoye and Vagankovskoye cemeteries in Moscow.
A large execution site has now been found in Kuropaty, six miles from
Minsk, the capital of Byelorussia. At least 102 000 people were murdered
there, including many women. Witnesses have related that the executions
began in the evenings and continued through the nights. The executioners
wore NKVD uniforms. The witness Mikolai Karpovich saw how people
stood lined up by a mass grave. They were gagged and blindfolded. To
save bullets, the executioners usually tried to shoot two people with each
shot. Executions took place there every day between 1937 and June 1941.
Thc people who lived near the Kuropaty forest could hear salvoes of shots
and prisoners begging and screaming for their lives. There were at least
five such execution sites around Minsk, where the butchers worked in
shifts. Uniformed NKVD men used to take part in the dance in the village
of Kuropaty at around 11 o'clock on Saturday evenings. (Expressen, 18th
of October 1988.)
About fifty mass graves in this area have later been opened. Prisoners
who were taken to Kuropaty in the winter were forced to step out of the
carriages in the severe cold, whereupon they were showered in icy water
and ordered to return to the carriages. Not many survived until the
following morning. The heads were cut off from all the frozen corpses.
The survivors were killed at the edge of the mass grave, into which all the
victims were thrown.
Moscow Television related on the 12th of September 1989 that nearly
300 000 victims had been found in an abandoned goldmine near Chel-
yabinsk. This was the largest mass grave. The Communists killed up to
250 000 "enemies of the people" in the forest of Bykovnya near Kiev
between 1937 and 1941. Most were shot in the neck, but a few had also
been poisoned by smoke (Dagens Nyheter, 25th of March 1989). That
place had earlier been called the grave of the victims of fascism. The
bodies of many Jews were supposed to have been hidden there, but this lie
was exposed after the fall of Communism.
303