Originally published 2021-08-29.
In August 2021 Ukrainian investigators confirmed at least 29 mass graves on the edge of Odesa (often spelled Odessa in English), close to the city's airport. Officials estimated that the pits hold the remains of 5,000 to 8,000 people, most of them believed to have been shot by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The find is one of the largest of its kind in Ukraine, and it added a new chapter to a story that Soviet authorities denied for decades.
Below is what was found, who the victims probably were, why identifying them is so hard, and how the Odesa site fits into the wider history of Stalin's terror in Ukraine.
What was discovered near Odesa in 2021
The graves came to light during survey work ahead of a planned expansion of Odesa International Airport. The land had later been used as a rubbish dump, which helped hide what lay underneath. By the end of August 2021, excavators had opened at least 29 burial pits and expected to find more as work continued.
Archaeologist Tetyana Samoylova, who worked on the dig, described a grim method of killing and burial. According to her account reported by Smithsonian Magazine, the executioners dug pits into the garbage and either threw people in or shot them where they stood. Many of the skulls recovered at the site, as at similar NKVD burial grounds, show a single gunshot wound to the back of the head.
The local branch of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory took part in the investigation, and Odesa's mayor, Gennady Trukhanov, said a decision on what to do with the remains would follow the exhumations, with a memorial planned for the site.
This site was not entirely unknown
One detail often missed in the 2021 headlines is that the area had been dug before. In 1943, during the Second World War, Odesa was under Romanian occupation as part of the territory Romania called Transnistria. A Romanian commission, led by forensic doctor Alexandru Birkle, excavated graves near the village of Tatarka (today Prylymanske) and identified 42 common graves. It estimated around 5,000 bodies in total, exhumed 516 and examined 486 of them. Most were men, and the examined remains showed shots to the back of the skull.
Those wartime findings were used by the occupying powers and then buried again, politically as well as physically, once Soviet rule returned. Work resumed only after Odesa historian Oleksandr Babich found fresh documents in Romanian archives. His research also suggests that the burials extend beyond the former dump onto land held by a military unit, which means the full size of the site is still not known.
Who the victims are believed to be
Ukrainian officials have said that around 8,600 people in the Odesa region were sentenced to death by the secret police between 1938 and 1941. Research on the Tatarka graves suggests that many of the dead had been arrested in the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1938 to 1940, and in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina after the Soviet Union took those regions from Romania in 1940.
The victims of this period were a broad mix of people. NKVD Order No. 00447, issued on 30 July 1937, targeted "former kulaks" (better-off peasants who had already been dispossessed during collectivisation), former officials of the old regime, members of non-Bolshevik parties, clergy, and anyone labelled an "anti-Soviet element". Separate "national operations" targeted Poles, Germans, Romanians and other minorities suspected of disloyalty. Without individual files, though, it is impossible to say which of these groups the Odesa dead belonged to, and labels such as "nationalists" or "kulaks" should be treated as possibilities rather than findings.
Why identifying the dead is so difficult
Identification depends on two things: forensic evidence from the remains and paper records showing who was arrested, sentenced and shot. In Ukraine many regional NKVD files were opened after independence, but key records for some operations remain classified in Moscow.
Sergiy Gutsalyuk, head of the local office of the Institute of National Memory, was blunt about the chances of getting them, saying the documents "will never be handed over to us under the current government in Russia." He said that in 2021, months before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which has made co-operation even less likely. Since then, Odesa itself has been repeatedly struck by Russian missiles and drones.
Even with good records, the work is slow. Remains in mass graves are often commingled, DNA comparison requires living relatives who come forward, and a former landfill is a hard environment for preserving bone and personal items.
Stalin's Great Terror in Ukraine
The main phase of the Great Purge, also called the Great Terror, ran from 1936 to late 1938, peaking while Nikolai Yezhov led the NKVD. Sentences were often passed by three-person panels known as troikas, without the accused present, and death sentences were carried out quickly, usually at night. Order 00447 set an initial quota of around 10,000 executions, yet at least three times that number were shot.
Soviet records count 681,692 executions in 1937 and 1938 alone. Historians' overall estimates for deaths in the terror range from about 700,000 to more than a million, depending on what is counted. For Ukraine, the country's foreign ministry has put the number of victims at about 200,000, and historian Timothy Snyder has estimated around 300,000 deaths from the "national terror" there. Among the victims was much of a generation of Ukrainian writers and artists, remembered today as the "Executed Renaissance".
Other mass graves: Bykivnia and beyond
The best-known NKVD burial ground in Ukraine is Bykivnia Forest, on the outskirts of Kyiv. Archaeologists have identified 210 separate mass graves there. Estimates of the number buried vary widely, from tens of thousands to 100,000, and some accounts give figures as high as 200,000, which is why the higher number should be read as an upper estimate rather than an established count.
Soviet authorities denied responsibility for Bykivnia for decades and blamed the killings on the Nazis. When the poet Vasyl Symonenko raised the issue in 1962, he was badly beaten and died soon afterwards. Independent Ukraine confirmed the burials in the 1990s, opened a memorial in 1994 and declared the site a national monument in 2006. Polish researchers believe Bykivnia also holds around 3,400 Polish officers shot in 1940, at the same time as the Katyn massacre. Similar killing fields exist across the former Soviet Union, from Kurapaty in Belarus to Butovo outside Moscow.
The Holodomor and the wider context
The terror of the late 1930s followed another catastrophe in Ukraine: the Holodomor, the famine of 1932 and 1933. Scholars broadly agree it was man-made, the result of forced collectivisation and grain procurement quotas that were impossible to meet. Recent research puts Ukrainian losses at roughly 3.5 to 5 million people. Ukraine and more than 30 other UN member states, along with the European Parliament, recognise it as a genocide. Historians still debate how far the famine was deliberately aimed at Ukrainians as a nation, as opposed to being a brutal by-product of Soviet policy that was then used selectively against them.
These memories remain politically charged. Russian state messaging has long portrayed Ukrainian national movements as fascist, pointing to collaboration by some nationalist groups during the German occupation. Historians note that collaboration and resistance both existed in wartime Ukraine, as across occupied Europe, and that millions of Ukrainians fought in the Red Army. None of that changes the fact that the people in the Odesa pits were killed years before the German invasion, by their own state.
Why sites like this still matter
For families, a confirmed grave can be the first official acknowledgement that a relative did not simply "disappear". For historians, each site tests the archival record against physical evidence. And for Ukraine, recovering this history is part of a long effort to document what happened under Soviet rule, which Ukraine's 2015 decommunisation laws and the opening of KGB archives were meant to support.
If you are researching a relative who vanished in the late 1930s, the most useful starting points are regional state archives in Ukraine, the Institute of National Memory, and databases of rehabilitated victims, many of which list name, date of arrest and sentence.
Sources: Smithsonian Magazine: Officials unearth Stalin-era mass grave in Ukraine; Wikipedia: Tatarka common graves; Wikipedia: Bykivnia graves; Wikipedia: Great Purge; Wikipedia: Holodomor; original report via BBC News.
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