dpa

BYKIVNA/KIEV, Jun 25, 2001 -- (dpa) It's a haunting little stretch of Ukrainian country road, a place once brutally terrorized by former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Less than a 20-minute drive east from the bridges crossing the Dnipro river in central Kiev, a field of white crosses appears by the roadside.

It is a mass grave at Bykivna cemetery. No one knows how many people are buried there exactly, but most estimates put the number in the thousands. All the victims died violently.

Stalin began a campaign of repressions in Ukraine in 1933. A dragnet by the Soviet KGB secret police took in the regime's opponents - intellectuals, businessmen, priests, students, and even simple farmers - and used kangaroo courts to murder them.

Ukrainians, far from Moscow and blessed with rich land that gave them enough to eat, resisted. When Stalin decided all private farms would become state collectives, farmers slaughtered their livestock rather than hand it over to the government.

Stalin retaliated by using the army to remove virtually all the food Ukraine grew and deliver it to factories in Russia. Living on the largest patch of fertile black earth loam in the world, some six million Ukrainians died of starvation.

As the purges wore on, Soviet soldiers and Communist party members died. After Stalin helped German dictator Adolf Hitler invade Poland in 1939, the dead bodies of Polish officers - all treated with lime so identification would be impossible - found their way to Bykivna.

When the Soviet Union began falling apart, Bykivna still was a dirty little local secret. A 1988 inscription said Ukrainians had died there during repressions, but claimed German invaders had done the killing.

After Ukraine became independent in August 1991, historians and victims' relatives joined to force the new government to put up a new inscription, identifying the murderers as Stalin's KGB.