Kurapaty: Western diplomats pay tribute to victims of Stalinists

On November 6, foreign diplomats have visited Kurapaty, a Stalin-era mass executions site, to pay the tribute to the victims of Stalin’s terror.

Kurapaty, a place on the outskirts of Minsk, is not just the national memorial and a mass grave of the victims of Stalinist repression; since 1993, it has been is a site of historical and cultural heritage. According to historians, 100,000 – 250,000 persons might have been killed there. A vast number of people were executed between 1937 and 1941 during the Great Purge by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. Among them, there were people of different nationalities: Belarusians, Poles, Russians, Jews and others. Archeologist Zyanon Paznyak’s unveiling the dark past of Kurapaty and further exhumation of the remains in 1988 gave an added momentum to the pro-democracy and pro-independence movement in Belarus in the last years of the USSR. Later the Communist party repeatedly attempted to shift the blame for shootings on Nazis.

“Today U.S. Chargé d’affaires to Belarus Jenifer Moore joined heads of missions of EU countries, Israel and Switzerland at Kurapaty to commemorate tens of thousands of victims of the Stalinist era, executed there between 1937-41,” the press service of the US Embassy Minsk reports.

In 1994, the then U.S. President Bill Clinton visited Kurapaty. At the same time, over his 25-year presidency, Belarusian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka has never come to honour the memory of the killed.

Meanwhile, he has sent greetings to the nation in the run-up to October Revolution Day which is officially celebrated in Belarus on November, 7.

“The autumn of 1917 dramatically changed the course of history. It heralded a new era of human development based on the principles of social equality, justice and humanism,” state-run news agency BelTA quotes Lukashenka.

In March 2019, he promised that there would never be sort of Stalinism in Belarus, even ‘under the dictatorship of Lukashenka’.

belsat.eu