Kurapaty, wooded area, northern outskirts of Minsk, Belarus, site of the execution of thousands of Belarussians and others by Soviet secret police between 1937 and 1941. The official count of those executed is 30,000, but historians say the number could be as high as 200,000. Beginning in the 1970s, archaeologist and historian Zianon Pazniak and others began taking testimony from witnesses, and in 1988 the existence of the mass grave there was publicized and then investigated by the government, which in 1989 confirmed the mass graves.
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