killed around 1938 in the Ukraine. Since then mass burial sights have been discovered outside major cities such as Minsk, Kiev, and Novosibirsk, and one with possibly 40,000 bodies in the Kirov region of Donetsk. A burial sight at Chelyabinsk, was found to contain more than 80,000 people. Zenon Pozniak, an archaeologist who has excavated many of these burial plots also found 510 burial pits in Kuropaty and calculated that each one contained about 150 bodies. That could mean there are around 75,000 bodies in there. Apparently there were as many as 1,000 pits originally (Lewis 106-107). Pozniak has also researched the circumstances of these people's deaths:They were shot by NKVD (secret police) soldiers in NKVD uniform. They shot them from behind, in the back and pushed them into the pit. When that group was finished, they covered the corpses with sand like a layer cake. They got the contents of the next lorry and shot them, and in that way they filled the pit right up to the top . . . people who lived in the villages nearby told us that . . . the earth would breathe. Some people weren't actually dead when they were buried, and the earth breathed and heaved and the blood came through (Lewis 107). Stalin used the Five Year Plans to make great strides in industrializing Russia. When he tried to equal that success with agricultural growth he met some resistance and ended up liquidating a class and causing famine. Socially, he gave some important social benefits to workers and gave women equal rights. But, he also tried to purge the country and eliminated a lot of the Party, most of the army, and a good part of the workers and peasants. Stalin made several industrial improvements for his country but, that does not even begin to equal the death and destruction that he caused.Works CitedDmytryshyn, Basil. USSR: A Concise History. 2nd ed. New York: Scribner's, 1971.Lewis, Jonathan, and Phillip Whitehead. Stalin. New York: Pantheon Books, ...
