Where is the Soviet version of Belzec and Sobibor?
A red herring (no pun intended).
The actual method of the elimination en masse of entire unwanted populations, whether by active killing in camps or in the field, or by passive killing through mass starvation, is not the issue.
The crucial factor is the radical policy of eliminating entire unwanted population groups, whether defined by ethnicity or socio-economic status or some other criteria.
That radical policy was initiated by the Bolshevik regime in Russia soon after it came to power, and continued off and on until 1941, reaching its climax under Stalin. Bolshevik exterminationist practice was imitated by the National Socialist regime in Germany, at first only on a very minor scale, but then in full force after the commencement of the armed ideological clash between Bolshevism and National Socialism.
While there may be no exact Soviet equivalent of Belzec and Sobibor, there were certainly direct equivalents of the massacre at Babi Yar and similar mass-killings in the field perpetrated by German security forces.
Once such was a massacre by Bolshevik forces in a ravine near Saratov in the early 1920s, described in the book "Red Terror in Russia" by the Socialist exile Sergei Mel'gunov (Westport, Conn, Hyperion Press, 1975; translation of "Krasnyi Terror v Rossii", reprint of the 1926 edition published by J.M. Dent. London).
The description of the massacre is very similar to that of the massacre at Babi Yar, down to the dynamiting of the ravine walls to cover the bodies and the wounded who managed to dig their way out and return to their homes, giving everyone an awful fright.
It appears that rather than set up extermination camps, the Soviet security forces preferred to do their mass killing in the field, at a wide number of killing fields, a modus operandi which the German security forces copied when they invaded the Soviet Union.
One of those killing fields was at Kuropaty, near Minsk. Many tens of thousands of victims were killed there by NKVD executioners, the executions continuing until just before the arrival of German forces.
In comparing the actual extermination methodologies employed by the Soviet Union and Germany, one must take into account the difference in their geographical situation.
If the Soviet Government wanted to eliminate a particular population group, it could simply deport it to the distant Arctic wastes and leave it there to disappear through cold and starvation.
That possibility was not open to the German Government, which had to resort to extermination camps and active killing by mechanical means.
As a matter of fact, at one point the German Government was considering a direct imitation of Soviet practice by deporting Jews to the White Sea area, where the Bolshevik regime had extablished its first concentration camps. But that plan fell through because of the German failure to capture those regions.
