From the early 1920s until late 1940s throughout the Stalinist purges , the Soviet government hauled the bodies of tortured and killed political prisoners to the pine forests outside the village of Bykivnia and buried them in a grave that spanned . So far , 210 separate mass graves have been identified by Polish and Ukrainian archaeologists working at the site . During the Soviet retreat in the early stages of the Operation Barbarossa , the Red Army troops levelled the village to the ground . The mass grave site was discovered by the Germans along with many other such sites throughout the Soviet Union . However , following the discovery of the Katyn massacre , the burial sites of Bykivnya was no longer part of German propaganda . After the Soviet recapture of the area in the course of the Second Battle of Kiev in 1943 , the site was yet again classified by the NKVD . In the 1950s the village was reconstructed as a suburb of Kiev . In the 1970s the Soviet authorities planned to construct a large bus station on the mass grave site , but the plan was abandoned
Katyn massacre
Katyn massacre
Bykivnia graves