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 Kyiv. In the 1970s the Soviet authorities planned to construct a large bus station on the mass grave site, but the plan was abandoned.