The Anniversary of the Sandarmokh Tragedy: Russia's Attempts to "Denazify" Ukrainians Did Not Begin Today

One of the reasons that the world does not understand the colonial essence of the current war and considers it simply a mistaken decision that arose in the sick imagination of one individual dictator Putin, is that the world knows little about our Soviet past, in particular, about the centuries-old anti-colonial struggle of Ukrainians for their right to be Ukrainians. We need to be reminded not only in the international arena, but also to ourselves that the missiles and drones that are flying at our country today, the occupying forces burning our cities, destroying cultural monuments, "peaceful Russian people" who are shouting "Hoyda! ”, thus calling the people to action — they all continue what the Soviet authorities have been doing to Ukrainians for many years. Because in fact, the special operation for the denazification of Ukrainians was not invented by Putin and it did not start today, but during Stalin's time.

And the anniversary of the execution of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the Sandarmokh forest massif, which took place from October 27 to November 4, 1937, is an occasion to once again tell, remind, show the criminal essence of the communism of that time, from which modern racism grew. This execution was cynically timed to the anniversary of the October Bolshevik coup of 1917, namely the cradle of the Soviet Union, where the enemy is now trying to drive us again with the help of a full-scale military attack. Unfortunately, the tragedy of Sandarmokh became only one of the pages of our Executed Renaissance, namely the generation of the Ukrainian intelligentsia of the 20s and 30s of the 20th century, cynically destroyed by the Stalinist regime. Despite the fact that history does not know the conditional constructions of word formation, the creative and intellectual potential of the representatives of that generation shows that Ukraine could have a completely different fate and ways of development than it received in the "evil empire". Instead, the best sons and daughters of our country ended up in firing pits all over the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), died from terrible and difficult conditions in the camps, and their achievements were erased from the memory of several generations.

In the psychological war that the Russian Federation unleashed long before the current full-scale war, among the constant trigger questions to Ukrainians were the following: "Where are your Nobel laureates?", "Where are your brilliant translations and translators?", "And where are your big and exemplary dictionaries"? Usually, people who are not very familiar with this topic were lost, not finding what to answer to this offensive and allegedly accusatory rhetoric. Instead, there can be only one answer: our most famous and outstanding cultural figures lie in large mass graves from the Bykivnia forest near Kyiv to the largest concentration camp of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics  "Solovki"... Killed by a Chekist bullet mainly in the back of the head. All these people are buried without honor or rituals. In this way, our most famous and outstanding cultural figures were persistently erased by the Soviet authorities from photographs, textbooks, documents — in general, from memory, as if they had never existed. After all, Moscow did not want to see even the smallest manifestations of national feeling on our lands. In addition, Moscow was not afraid and did not hesitate to use all the capabilities of the repressive apparatus to achieve its goal.

On August 5, 1937, one of the most massive punitive operations of the authorities against its own citizens began in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The operational order of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics   No. 00447 "On the repression of former kulaks, criminals who committed crimes and other anti-Soviet elements", signed on July 30, 1937 by People's Commissar M. Yezhov, clearly regulated the course of the secret special operation, its duration and the number of potential victims.

The Operational order of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the USSR No. 00447. Source: Sectoral State Archives of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) f 9, file 81-sp

Was it not from those times that the war criminal Putin borrowed the name Special military operation (SMO) and his other terminology? The terrible machine of death worked clearly and unemotionally, regardless of status and origin, past merits and professional value, sparing neither young students nor respected academics from a terrible fate.

One of the acts of execution. Source: Sectoral State Archives of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Security Service of Ukraine (SSU). Fund 5. Case 901

The highest period of executions of Ukrainian intelligentsia was the end of October — beginning of November 1937, and its tragic symbol was the Sandarmokh forest massif in Karelia. It was here, from October 27 to November 4, 1937, that officers of the Operational order of the People's Commissariat for Internal shot 1,111 prisoners of the "first stage of the Solovki special prison ", among whom there were many Ukrainians, in particular: theater director Les Kurbas, writers Mykola Kulish, Mykola Zerov, Pavlo Filipovych, Valerian Polishchuk, Valerian Pidmohylnyi, Mykola Voronyi, academicians Stepan Rudnytskyi and Matvii Yavorskyi and many other scientists, priests, journalists, and museum workers.

Behind each of these names is not just a bright biography and powerful creative achievements. Behind each of them is primarily the spread of the Ukrainian idea and culture as a life choice, even if it had a distinct left-wing political color. Behind each of them is an intellectual height that, under other circumstances, would have guaranteed the nation alternative ways of development, a vision of the future.

Unfortunately, what we got instead was a gap between generations in culture, the infection of society with the virus of fear and inferiority, the physical elimination of the national elite and the destruction of part of their scientific and artistic heritage. Our historical account that we can present to the "evil empire" has quite real dimensions: lost human lives, broken destinies of family members of the so-called enemies of the people, forever lost manuscripts, diaries, letters, without which the idea of ​​the interwar period is pale and incomplete.

However, not only the Sandarmokh forest massif became the place where the representatives of the Executed Renaissance died and then rested in peace. It is worth noting that at the end of October 1937, the echoes of gunshots could also be heard in the Kyiv torture chambers of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs. On October 24, 1937, Ukrainian futurist poets Mykhailo Semenko, Andrii Mykhailiuk, Mykola Skuba, poet Viktor Hudym, linguist Oleksii Syniavskyi, jurist Arnold Christer, and historian Vasyl Hurystrymba were shot on October 24, 1937. In addition, on October 26, the director of the Kyiv Academic Opera and Ballet Theater of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), Ivan Yanovsky, was also shot, on October 27, the writer, linguist, translator Mike Johansen, on October 28, the writer Myroslava Sopilka, and on November 2, the poet and critic Yakov Savchenko. Their bodies, like the bodies of tens of thousands of other citizens, were taken by officers of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs to the Bykivnia forest, dumped in pits, covered with lime and earth. Their fates were hidden under the label "Secret" for many decades.

Judgments of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Documents from archival and criminal cases of shot artists. Source: Sectoral State Archives of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Security Service of Ukraine (SSU), fund 6

Unfortunately, neither the Sandarmokh forest massif nor Bykivnia are the only burial places of victims of political repression. Similar burial grounds on a smaller scale were located in almost every regional center of Ukraine at the time. Rutchenko field (Donetsk), the area of ​​the Park of Culture and Recreation (Vinnytsia), Piatykhatky (Kharkiv), Catholic Cemetery (Uman), Jewish Cemetery (Cherkasy), the village of Halyavin (Chernihiv Oblast), Second Christian Cemetery (Odesa), 9 kilometer of the Zaporizhzhia highway (Dnipro), the tract of Dem'ianiv Laz (Ivano-Frankivsk), the tract of Salina (Lviv region), the National Museum-Memorial of Victims of the Occupation Regimes, or the Prison on Łącki Street (Lviv) — all these places are direct evidence of the crimes of Stalin's totalitarian regime against Ukrainians. Currently, crimes committed by the Russian regime in Bucha, Borodianka, Izium and other cities of Ukraine have been added to the list.

When considering the generation of the Executed Renaissance, in general, one does not always want to talk about the victims, so as not to contribute to the creation of a persistent personification of Ukrainians as victims. One does not always want to consider the controversy of social and political processes, so as not to spoil the positive and glamorous ideas about the period of "Ukrainization" and the "flourishing of national culture". Even fewer people dare to analyze how the Russian Bolsheviks, having seized power, used and bribed Ukrainian intelligentsia, because in this case they will have to revise the established images of artists.

However, an honest conversation cannot be bypassed and should be held anyway. Otherwise, we will not understand how the "roaring twenties" with a huge number of creative personalities, organizations, publications, and scientific schools turned into the bloody thirties. Otherwise, we will not explain why the devoted Ivan Kulyk turned out to be equally dangerous for the Soviet system. He was the head of the Union of Soviet Writers of Ukraine, a person who enjoyed the trust of the party apparatus, carried out scheduled work in the diaspora and was engaged in the destruction of "bourgeois nationalism", and Yakiv Vodyanyi is a playwright, a military figure of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR), one of the chieftains of Holodoyarsk. Or the historian Vasyl Hurystrymba, who in 1934 graduated from the Moscow Institute of the Red Professorship at the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and in 1937 was accused of "maliciously processing notes to the works of V. Lenin." In addition, he was also accused of trying in the textbook to "represent the entire heroic past of the Ukrainian people, their struggle for independence, their colossal creative powers, to show that Ukrainians have always strived for self-determination."

Excerpt from the interrogation protocol of Vasyl Hurystrymba. Case 52213 fp Source: Sectoral State Archives of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Security Service of Ukraine (SSU), fund 6

Observations of the reality that prevailed in the 1930s in the the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, some recorded evidence clearly hint that the artists of the Executed Renaissance fell into a trap from which they did not have the strength and opportunities to get out. Belief in the central utopian image, namely in the ideal of humanism, a harmonious world structure where everything is for the sake of man, hope for a revolutionary renewal of humanity, trust in the Russian proletariat later led Mykola Khvylovyi to commit suicide, and many artists to arrests. In 1937–1938, everyday conversations among intellectuals about the state of Ukrainian culture automatically turned into the subject of accusations. In particular, Maik Yohansen testified during the interrogations that "under the Soviet authorities, those who write truthfully are not allowed to be published, and favorable conditions are created for the untalented who write under dictation." In addition, according to his conviction, "Ukrainian culture is suppressed, and Ukrainians are not allowed to develop their native Ukrainian culture." The investigators, perhaps, only rejoiced at such confessions and massively created from representatives of the artistic environment those people who belong to "counter-revolutionary terrorist nationalist organizations."

Excerpt from the interrogation protocol of the shot Ukrainian writer Maik Yohansen. Case 76499 fp. Source: Sectoral State Archives of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Security Service of Ukraine (SSU), fund 6

The diverse, heterogeneous generation of the Executed Renaissance is now returning to us a second time. It regained its voice for the first time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the texts of executed artists began to appear in the public domain, when researchers were able to at least voice the ideas and concepts announced half a century earlier.

Today, with songs to the words of Ukrainian poets or with the Ukrainian creative association MUR, which aims to tell about repressed artists and interest in national literature, certainly resonates with the poetic dreams expressed by M. Yohansen:

"Let's go back to the Motherland,

Let's go back to our home

We will come like lush and wild greenery

We will come like a spring thunderstorm

We will roar with beech thunder daringly

And then we will spread like a spring water flow."

However, the youthful zeal, sincere admiration and romanticization of the artists of the Executed Renaissance does not completely return them to their true selves. And despite their flaws and miscalculations, they deserve to appear in all difficult moments of time and human nature. And they will not become smaller or worse because of this. But perhaps the finale of the artist's life path will finally save us from repeating constant historical mistakes: it is impossible to come to an agreement with the Russian Federation, which suffers from mania for imperial greatness and does not recognize the independence, cultural and national separateness of Ukrainians!

The repression against the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the Soviet Union was an act of "denazification" at a time when the term "nation" had not yet acquired a generalized meaning, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) did not exist, when there was nothing that could threaten the Russian Federation. But prominent representatives of the Ukrainian elite, who were at the forefront of humanitarian and scientific development, had a national consciousness, and partly gained world recognition, were brutally destroyed. Such a fate awaited them regardless of loyalty or opposition, social origin or political views. The situation developed in such a way because the Russian Federation always clearly understood that the beheading of Ukrainians as a nation, the physical elimination of its leaders, the destruction of cultural heritage items would eventually lead to the "final solution of the Ukrainian question", to the disappearance of our people from the world map. That is why we must put up the strongest possible resistance not only to the military invasion by the Russian Federation, but also to the historical amnesia that has been cultivated for decades. In addition, we should now oppose the Russian Federation's attempts to rehabilitate Stalinism with its genocidal policy, and its attempts to hide and not spread information about our losses during the communist era. That is why we should remember the tragedy of Sandramokh, the tragedy of Bykivnia...