On April 1, the Zhytomyr oblast court sentenced 39-year-old serial killer Anatoly Onopriyenko to execution by a bullet to the back of the head for the murder of 52 people, including 10 children and four pensioners. It's unlikely that Onopriyenko will be executed, as Ukraine, upon joining the Council of Europe, imposed a moratorium on executions.
Also on April 1, a British court in London sentenced retired British rail employee 78-year-old Anthony Savoniuk to life imprisonment for the killing of at least 15 Jews in 1942 in the town of Domachevo, which today is in Belarus but was in Poland before the war.
Savoniuk was 21 years old when he killed his Jewish neighbors as a member of the town's German police. After the war he went to England with the Polish Free Army, which was part of the British army fighting the Nazis. Savoniuk had joined the Polish Army after defecting from the 30th SS division – a formation that had a German command but was composed mainly of East Europeans, including a large number of Ukrainians.
Savoniuk was the first to be found guilty in Britain under a special law allowing British residents to be tried for crimes against humanity committed in Nazi-occupied territory. The British Parliament passed the War Crime Act in 1991, after a very strong lobbying effort by Jewish organizations, spearheaded by the Simon Weisenthal foundation in Los Angeles, California.
The British investigators first heard of Savoniuk's war-time killings from the Soviet Embassy in London. In 1988 it passed on his name in a British government inquiry into the residence of Nazi war criminals in Britain. The KGB had tracked Savoniuk to London after intercepting his letter and another letter by an acquaintance sent to Belarus. After a painstakingly detailed and secret investigation, the British police arrested the surprised Savoniuk at his home in London in 1996.
It is great news that both killers were brought to justice. But when will Soviet killers be investigated and tried?
The number of Soviet citizens who were killed or died in gulags between 1917 and 1953, when Stalin died, has been estimated at 20 million.
Among them were 2,000 official writers and poets, according to Alexander Yakovlev, who heads Russian President Boris Yeltsin's commission on rehabilitation of victims of political repression.
Where is the equivalent presidential commission in Ukraine? And why has parliament not passed a law to try those suspected of crimes against humanity?
Why hasn't the government started inquiries into mass killings in Ukraine? For example, why has there not been an investigation into the killing of 20,000 or more political prisoners in western Ukraine in June 1941 by the NKVD? Or who conducted the mass deportations and killings from western Ukraine to Siberia after World War II?
Hundreds of such incidents have not been officially investigated. Do some people hope that with the passage of time this will all be forgotten – perhaps those who arrested the hundreds of Soviet dissidents in the 1960 and '70s?
Nazi war crimes should also be reinvestigated, as Soviet inquiries were conducted poorly, if at all. It would not surprise anyone if former Savoniuk-like killers were discovered living in Ukraine.
In the first eight years of independence, the government has failed to raise the society's consciousness of past repressions.
Soviet killers, instead of being investigated and brought to trial, die with medals and honors. It is as if the government had given them immunity from prosecution. Today's political class is trying to create a collective amnesia on the question of Soviet atrocities.
The Stalinists need this institutionalized silence in order to come back to power. The new state should not be neutral on the question of crimes against humanity by a previous regime.
It is high time parliament passes a law to investigate crimes against humanity, which includes murders committed for political, religious or ethnic reasons. Such a law would help to heal the regional divisions between western and eastern Ukraine, and between Jews and the rest of the society.
Otherwise, very little will be learned from the past. New generations will continue to be clones of previous generations, with the same views and prejudices. People growing up in ignorance of the past will repeat the same mistakes.
