VLADIVOSTOK —? Bones uncovered on the outskirts of the Pacific port of Vladivostok belong to hundreds of victims of Stalinist purges executed by the NKVD secret police, municipal officials and experts said Thursday.
City authorities said last month that at least 495 skeletons — many with head gunshot wounds — were among 3.5 tons of bones that had been unearthed from a mass grave by workmen building a road.
"The theory that the uncovered remains belong to the victims of repressions has been confirmed," Vladivostok's city administration said in a statement.
Regional forensic experts said in the statement that the skeletons were mainly men aged 25 to 35. They were killed "more than 50 but less than 100 years ago" with 9 mm bullets shot from pistols routinely used by NKVD officers, the experts said.
City officials said a criminal case could not be opened because the statute of limitations had expired.
"A decision on the date and place of a new burial will be made in the near future," the statement said.
Yaroslav Livansky, the head of a group of volunteers who helped excavate the site, said the victims had been put on their knees and killed in cold blood with shots fired at the back of their heads.
Millions of Soviet citizens were executed by secret police or died in forced agricultural collectivization and gulag labor camps during Stalin's rule from the 1920s until his death in 1953. The peak of Stalin-era repression, known as The Great Terror, was in 1937 and 1938.
But many Russians still treasure memories of Stalin's era, saying the iron-fisted leader industrialized the nation, defeated Nazism in World War II and left the Soviet Union with the nuclear bomb.