Kurapaty

Kurapaty (Belarusian: Курапаты, IPA: [kuraˈpatɨ]) is a wooded area on the outskirts of Minsk, Belarus, where a vast number of people were executed between 1937 and 1941 during the Great Purge by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.

[8] The discovery by historian Zianon Paźniak and exhumation of the remains in 1988 gave added momentum to the pro-democracy and pro-independence movement in Belarus in the last years of the Soviet Union before it was dissolved.

[9] In 2001, when the Kurapaty site was threatened by a planned widening of the Minsk Ring Road, youth from the Belarusian Popular Front, Zubr, and smaller organizations occupied the site and sat out a bitter winter in tents, trying to halt the road construction, however with no success.

On October 29, 2004, the Jewish community of Belarus installed a monument in memory of the Jews and other nationals who were murdered in Kurapaty forest.

Each year in November, on Dziady (the All Saints or the day when Belarusians commemorate their deceased forefathers), hundreds of people visit this site of crimes of Soviet political repression.