Near the Ural Mountains city of Chelyabinsk, skulls pierced by bullet holes were found where gold once was mined.
In Kolpashova, a Siberian village on the Ob River, excavations released a stream of mummified corpses to float down the river.In the Ukrainian city of Poltava, diggers at a sand quarry uncovered a series of trenches full of bones - the remains of an estimated 5,000 people.
"This is a country built on bones," says Oleg Golovanov, a member of a group called Memorial that is dedicated to the memory of Josef Stalin's victims.
The bones lay undisturbed for decades while the Soviet government refused to acknowledge the estimated 20 million victims of Stalin's bloody years of terror.
Now they are coming back to haunt the country. About once a month for the past year, the official press has reported the unearthing of another mass grave as the Soviet Union reveals the horror of its past.
On Tuesday, Soviet television carried another report, this one about the reburial of 350 skeletons found on a mountain near Chelyabinsk. A correspondent said innocent "men, women, old people and even children" - possibly as many as 300,000 - were loaded onto trucks and shot at night.
The Memorial group found the remains buried in a former gold mine where authorities wanted to build houses. Now officials plan to turn the area into a memorial, the correspondent said.
A reburial ceremony is also planned Saturday for the remains of 540 of Stalin's victims found at a garbage dump in the Ukrainian coal center of Donetsk.
Golovanov coordinates efforts to track down the mass graves for Memorial, the national group lobbying to clear the names of Stalin's "enemies of the people," as well as help their families and those who survived years in labor camps.
He believes there could be as many as 100,000 unmarked mass graves left as a legacy from the purges, repressions and labor camps Stalin oversaw from the late 1920s until his death in 1953.
Press coverage of the graves began last year when a killing field was found in the Kuropaty forest of Byelorussia. It escalated with a similar discovery in Bykovnya in the Ukraine.
Memorial receives a steady stream of letters with information about newly revealed sites, and Golovanov said he sometimes wonders, "What is your goal in digging them up?"
He answers: to make sure people know all the evil of the Stalin years. He believes there is a need to restore respect to the dead.
"You're walking, and they're lying there under you, and not a single person knows about their fate," he said.
Golovanov believes the caches of bones also make a forceful statement about the country's Communist rulers.
"The people in the government are the same now as they were then," he said. "People can't help but see that."
The party's policymaking Central Committee last month ordered local governments to do all they could to redress Stalin-era wrongs, including cooperating with groups like Memorial. "Mass burial places should be recognized as official cemeteries," the decree said, and "organs of the police and the KGB should be more involved in this work."
But Golovanov said revealing and marking the old graves remains fraught with conflicts.
The KGB, whose predecessor, the NKVD, carried out much of the killing, often does not open its files to help find graves and identify victims. KGB officials say their archives are in such terrible shape they aren't worth examining.
In Donetsk, the local government had turned the killing field over to developers and was reluctant to change its plans, the youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported Wednesday. Eventually, authorities agreed to turn most of the land into a memorial park.
In Poltava, the grave site is now a dump.