‘There will be no forgiveness’

by James Marson, Kyiv Post, Staff Writer   

Thousands came to the Bykivnya mass grave northeast of Kyiv on May 17 to remember an estimated 100,000 victims of Stalin’s repressions.

Late at night at the end of the 1930s, tram number 23 would rattle its way from Kyiv to Brovary with a grim cargo on board: dead bodies. Victims of the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, they were on the way to be tossed into mass graves at Bykivnya forest.

On May 17, several thousand people gathered at the memorial center in the forest to mark Ukraine’s Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression and remember those destroyed by the Soviet machine.

“Here, at Bykivnya, Stalin and his monstrous hangmen killed the bloom of Ukraine,” said President Victor Yushchenko in a speech at the event. “There is no forgiveness, and there will be none.”

Yushchenko’s presidency has seen a marked attempt to revise traditional Soviet views of Ukraine’s history. He has drawn international attention to Holodomor, the man-made famine that killed several million people in Ukraine in 1932-3, overseen the erection of statues to Ukrainian national heroes and ordered the declassification and publication of thousands of documents from the archives of the SBU, Ukraine’s State Security Service, known in Soviet times as the KGB.

In the days leading up to the Day of Remembrance, SBU archivists announced that they had identified 14,191 bodies in the mass graves using archival materials. The exact number of people buried at Bykivnya is unknown, but estimates suggest as many as 100,000 were dumped here during the orgy of killing from 1937 to 1941 that was part of the Great Terror unleashed by Stalin against political opponents.

Yushchenko praised the archivists for their work, part of the drive to declassify and publish archival documents on political repressions, the Ukrainian liberation movement and Holodomor that he ordered in January. Around 800,000 files previously marked “secret” and “top secret” will be opened up and made available for publication.

Declassifying the documents is only a small part of the archivists’ work, said Volodymyr Vyatrovych, the director of the SBU archives. As the files are declassified, electronic copies are being taken that are available for viewing at centers across the country, 14 of which have already been opened.

“All the stories reflect the larger picture,” Vyatrovych said. “We want to give people an opportunity to see the documents and make their own interpretations.” He added that there has been a marked increase in interest from relatives in recent months wanting to find out about the fate of their family members.

Some of those gathered in Bykivnya forest on May 17 had brought their own documents and stories. One lady, who gave her name as Natalia, said that her grandfather had been denounced to the NKVD by the head of the local village council who wanted to take his apartment. She claimed the man’s son still lives there and that she can’t get the apartment back, despite possessing documents that she says prove it belongs to her family.

Such stories are a testament to the paranoia and vicious self-interest that combined in an ostensibly political campaign. Anyone could be denounced as an “enemy of the people” as the purge spun out of control, even consuming people with seemingly solid party credentials.

Hryhoriy Brovchenko was an activist who had taken part in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. But in 1937, the NKVD took him away as an enemy of the people, killed him and dumped his body at Bykivnya. His daughter, Olha Kostenko, was among those at the ceremony.

Yushchenko listed a number of the most famous victims of repression who are known to lie in the forest, including writers, poets, professors, doctors and priests. “An invisible link runs from Bykivnya to all of the countless cemeteries of the communist terror in our land,” he said. “All of Ukraine is part of this hellish network. The duty of the nation is to remember everyone.”

He also called for the removal of all symbols of Soviet repression from the country.

“Ukraine must finally purge itself of the symbols of a regime that destroyed millions of innocent people,” he said, adding that 400 such monuments had been taken down in the past year.

Not everyone agrees with the president’s steps. The Head of the State Archives, Olha Ginzburg, a member of the Communist Party, has criticized the president’s decision to publish archival documents. The president has often riled Russian leaders with his portrayal of their country as the perpetrator of horrific crimes against Ukraine during the Soviet period.

Political analysts suggest that his willingness to touch the prickly subject of Ukraine’s Soviet past has opened a can of worms which is negatively affecting his popularity, which now runs in single digits.

“Many people who benefited from the Soviet Union are still alive,” said Roman Krutsyk, president of the non-governmental organization Memorial, which documents Soviet political repressions. “But lots of people who suffered are also still alive, and relatives of those who were killed. It is essential for Ukraine as an independent state that it remembers its past.”

Photo: Yaroslav Debelyi, Olga Kostenko remembers her father, Grygoriy Brovchenko, one of an estimated 100,000 victims of Stalin’s mass repressions who are buried in Bykivnya forest near Kyiv.

Source: Kyiv Post, http://www.kyivpost.com/nation/41914