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Commemorative rally held at Kurapaty

About 500 people attended an annual commemorative rally held Sunday at Kurapaty, the unofficial memorial at a Stalin-era massacre site just outside Minsk, on the occasion of Dzyady (Remembrance of Ancestors Day).

Displaying historically national white-red-white flags, participants put up about 20 new memorial wooden crosses in addition to dozens of crosses erected earlier, laid flowers, lit oil lamps, and sang “Mahutny Bozha” (Oh, Lord Almighty), a Belarusian-language religious anthem.

Government-controlled newspapers insist that the current Belarusian authorities are not to blame for the Stalinist terror and atrocities, but “by putting up a Stalin bust at the dummy Stalin Line, they hit with actions, words, and attitude, destroying people’s souls,” Yuras Belenki, deputy chairman of the Conservative Christian Party (CCP), the official organizer of the rally, said in his speech.

CCP Executive Secretary Valery Buyval read out a letter from Zyanon Paznyak, the émigré leader of the party.

The Soviet regime killed more than two million Belarusians in the period between 1919 and 1953, Mr. Paznyak, formerly a historian and archeologist, noted in his message. “The Soviet occupation of Belarus should be recognized as a regime of genocide against the Belarusians,” he stressed.

Mr. Paznyak was the first to tell the Belarusian public the grisly truth about Kurapaty. In June 1988, he published an article in the Minsk-based literary weekly Litaratura i Mastatstva about what he discovered during his excavations at the Kurapaty woody area. According to Mr. Paznyak, the Stalin-era NKVD executed and buried some 220,000-250,000 people there, mainly in 1937-41, the peak period of the Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union. Mr. Paznyak's publication, which was actually the first significant fruit of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost in Belarus' public life, sent shock waves throughout the country. A non-governmental organization devoted to the documentation of crimes in the Stalin era was launched in the wake of that shock, while Mr. Paznyak founded and headed the Belarusian Popular Front, the country's first opposition group.

In 1989, under the pressure of public opinion, the Belarusian government set up a commission to probe Mr. Paznyak's findings. The commission confirmed that the Kurapaty graves contained the remains of NKVD victims but said that their number was significantly lower than Mr. Paznyak's estimate and stood at some 30,000. Kurapaty was officially declared a memorial site, but the government took no further steps to honor the victims or their burial place. On October 30, 1988, police broke up a mass Kurapaty procession in commemoration of Stalin terror victims with the use of tear gas and truncheons. Mr. Paznyak was one of the organizers of the demonstration. //BelaPAN

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