Stalin&#146;s victims

last updated 8 January 2015

Toksovo, Russia

The Russian human-rights group Memorial has discovered a mass grave that could hold as many as 32,000 corpses of people killed by the Soviet government. The state killing machine that Josef Stalin set in motion in the 1920s managed to murder tens of millions of people by the time the dictator died in 1953. But most of the bodies were never found, and Russia’s modern intelligence service refuses to release information from the files of its Soviet predecessor. After years of detective work, Memorial has begun exhuming corpses from a field in Toksovo, near St. Petersburg. Investigator Mikhail Pushnitsky said the monstrousness of the communist era didn’t sink in for him until he dug up body after body. “When you get to your 20th skull,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “you get angry.”