May 12 saw the now traditional Day of Remembrance of Victims of the Communist Regime marked in the forest of Bykivnia in a Kyiv suburb. Why in Bykivnia? The truth about the mass burial site in this forest was established with difficulty. The Soviet authorities persisted in denying the fact of mass shootings in Sectors 19 and 20 of the Darnytsia Forestry, claiming it was a burial site of victims of the Nazis. It was only the fourth (!) government commission that, aided by the prosecutor’s office, finally admitted in 1989 that the burial site in Bykivnia contained the remains of “enemies of the people,” those arrested, tortured in Kyiv prisons (particularly in what would become the October Palace of Culture and at the Lukyanivka Prison), shot, and buried in the forest.
In fact, the burial site was unearthed during the early days of the Nazi occupation, but the Soviets stuck to their story. The situation began to change in 1989, owing primarily to the then all-Union Memorial Society. Relying on the government commission’s findings, experts concluded that a total of 6,783 individuals were buried in the vicinity of Bykivnia in 1936-41. Further research, however, points to 130-150 thousand victims, including 5,000 Polish officers massacred at Bykivnia in the spring of 1940, half a year after the Soviet army’s “mission of liberation “ in Western Ukraine and Belarus.
Bykivnia remains an open issue, but further investigation requires cooperation from authorities. Much has been done over the past several years by the Memorial’s Kyiv organization (chaired by Roman Krutsyk) investigating NKVD atrocities. During last year’s visit of Pope John Paul II, Bykivnia received world media coverage, as a mass for the dead was celebrated at the site by the hierarchs of all Christian churches along with rabbis and muftis. This year, the mournful event was practically ignored by the authorities. To some 500 persons gathered for the occasion, the absence of the president, premier, even vice premier for humanitarian affairs came as a shock. Of course, with the elections already history and the first session of the fourth Verkhovna Rada to begin the next day, the leading domestic politicians had too many other things on their minds...
Aldous Huxley wrote, “It takes two to make a murder.” The Bykivnia case is still open. A legally effective verdict in the case remains “suspended” as the prosecutor’s office of independent Ukraine continues to sabotage the work of the investigation. Even now there are many who insist that no mass blood purges ever took place.
That same Sunday, May 12, a ceremony for the dead was performed at the mass grave by the hierarchs of Ukraine’s traditional churches, followed by a memorial meeting. Hopefully, a grand pantheon will be erected on this holy ground; the required technical documentation has been prepared. Now it is the authorities’ turn. So far the problem has been tackled only by the Memorial Society. That Sunday people attending the sad event saw a voluminous exposition by the Memorial Cross, titled Ukrainian Solovky (photos compiled and captions written by Yury Shapoval, Ph.D. in history). Thus, on November 10, 1937, alone, 1,111 Ukrainian intellectuals, artists, peasants, and workers were shot as alleged Ukrainian fascists in the ravine of Sandarmokh in Karelia.
Kyiv Memorial President Roman Krutsyk noted, “Regrettably, there is no top-level historical, legal, or moral assessment of the hard totalitarian past in Ukraine. Until the authorities do this, we won’t be able to build a law-governed state. The problem is extremely serious; today we hear regrets for Stalin. Memorial organized a museum exhibit illustrating crimes of the Soviet regime; in fact, we made a present of it to the Ukrainian state. The descendants of those butchers claim nothing of the kind ever happened. The least they could do would be to formally apologize for those crimes. Not all of those killed by the Stalin regime have been rehabilitated. We should follow the Jewish example. They remember the Holocaust. The Poles remember their victims and restore their cemeteries even in other countries. The famine of 1932-33 claimed 6-10 million Ukrainian lives (no one knows the exact death toll). Official Soviet statistics point to about a million people killed by the famines of 1921-23 and 1946-47. But what about the Stalinist purges, mass deportations to Siberia, and almost nine million who died in World War II?
“Our government plans to form a government commission next year (!), timing it to coincide with the seventeenth anniversary of the 1932-1933 Holodomor. Now this is an act of flagrant contempt of one’s own history. I’m not saying that it’s a deliberate act, but the fact remains that the people in power lack even elementary knowledge. If things were set right in this state, organizations such as the Memorial would simply be unnecessary. We have a standing exhibit called Never to be Forgotten (6-a vul. Stelmakha, open 11:00 to 18:00, except Monday and Tuesday). It revives the facts and events from our totalitarian past. Visit it and you will see that you know little about your fate in the twentieth century, and you must have this knowledge to be worthy of being called Ukrainians.”
