At all times they were directed and carried out by the Soviet secret police under its changing titles: the Cheka during the Civil War, the OGPU during forced collectivisation of agriculture, and the NKVD during the Great Purge.

[5] Some dated back to the Red Terror[6] or to the intervening years when the secret police in all major Soviet cities regularly used unmarked graves in existing cemeteries to dispose of those they executed or killed during interrogation.

In preparation for mass murder on such a scale the NKVD People's Commissar Yezhov instructed his subordinates throughout the Soviet Union to identify areas not far from the major urban centres where thousands of bodies could be quickly concealed.

This was described by the late Arseny Roginsky[9] “In July that year NKVD departments across the USSR had already begun to set aside special ‘zones’, areas for the mass burial of those they shot.

With Stalin's approval, NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria issued orders to shoot 25,700 Polish "nationalists and counter-revolutionaries", Poles held captive in a number of internment camps in western Russia, on date.