People had long known that there was an animal burial ground at the Civali State Farm. Bones of animals that died from epidemics and disease were brought there. In the 1960s, the capital of the BSSR grew — the city spread into these areas, and new houses were built. The burial ground was due to be cleared, but human remains were found among the animal bones during its excavation. The bones were twisted with barbed wire and had gunshot wounds to the skulls. The bones of people and animals were burned and buried in the forest near the road to Rakaŭ by order from above. According to the historian Ihar Kuzniatsou, the burial ground was discovered and destroyed in the 1990s during the construction of the Puškinskaja metro station.
In the early 1990s, the poet Siarhei Zakonnikau recounted a story that he had heard. Apparently, in 1938, Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s People’s Commissar for Railroads, ordered the execution of around 300 Belarusian railway workers for sabotage — namely, for refusing to send deportation trains to Siberia and the Polar Areas. To hide the crime, their bodies were supposedly buried in the animal burial ground in Civali. Moved, Zakonnikau even wrote a poem titled “Civali.”
Indeed, Kaganovich served as People’s Commissar for Railways three times. During the Great Purge, he was one of those involved in compiling the so-called “Stalin lists” — lists of individuals who were sentenced to the harshest possible punishment with the personal approval of the Central Committee leadership of the All-Union Communist Party of the Bolsheviks. Kaganovich’s signature appears on 189 lists. These show that more than 19,000 people were executed.
On 13 November 1936, the NKVD issued an order entitled “On strengthening the fight against accidents on railway transport,” and on 29 July 1937, the Main Directorate of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Militia of the NKVD issued an order entitled “On the cleansing of the railways from socially harmful elements.” Any railway accident was considered sabotage, punishable by death.
In 1937–1938, broad purges took place in Minsk, resulting in dozens of railway workers being executed. The exact locations of the shootings are difficult to determine today. Nevertheless, memorial events for the killed railway workers have been repeatedly held at the site of the former animal burial ground in Civali.