( AP ) - Workers rebuilding a 19th century Moscow house dug up the remains of nearly three dozen people and investigators were trying to determine their identity, a city police official said Thursday.
Police also found a rusted pistol in the estate where the estimated 34 remains were found, which was owned by a famous czarist-era noble family, the Sheremyetevs, Moscow city police spokesman Yevgeny Gildeyev said.
Some of the remains, which were found in a basement of one of the estate's buildings, had gunshot wounds to the skull and appeared to date back to the 1930s, and it was possible that more corpses would be found, he said.
The Soviet Union in the 1930s experienced a wave of politically motivated killings and purges of the government and Communist Party orchestrated by Josef Stalin's secret police. The killings reached their apex in 1937 during what came to be known as the Great Terror.
An estimated 1.7 million people were arrested in 1937-38 by the security services alone, and at least 818,000 of them were shot, historians estimate.