On Sunday, May 18, Ukraine marked the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression, the Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications reminded Ukrainians on social media.
It was a day of mourning for those who were killed “only for the right to be themselves: to think, speak, live freely.” On this day, Ukrainians remembered those whose lives were broken by the communist Soviet regime.
The International Committee of the Red Cross recalled that mass political repression in the USSR, especially during the so-called “Great Terror” of 1937-1938, became one of the most tragic pages of Ukrainian history.
According to archival data, in just two years, nearly 200,000 people were sentenced to death in the Ukrainian SSR, including more than 120,000 who were executed. Among them were scientists, artists, priests, peasants, soldiers, and teachers. Some were sent to Gulag camps or other places of detention. All of them became “enemies of the people” on false charges.
One of the most famous mass graves was the Bykivnia forest on the outskirts of Kyiv. It is here that the bodies of perhaps more than 100,000 people killed by the Soviet secret police are buried. Among the victims were poets Mykhailo Semenko and Mike Johansen, artist Mykhailo Boichuk, Metropolitan Vasyl Lypkivsky, and other Ukrainian cultural figures.
The Soviet authorities systematically concealed these crimes: burial sites were bulldozed, archives were classified, and sentences were often handed down by extrajudicial “trials” without the right to defense or appeal. Testimonies were extracted under torture.
State recognition of the crimes of the communist regime took place only after Ukraine regained its independence.
In 1991, the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR adopted the Law on Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression in Ukraine, and in 2015, the Law on Condemnation of the Communist and Nazi Totalitarian Regimes and Prohibition of Their Symbols. Subsequently, the legal framework for the rehabilitation procedure was improved.
“This day is a reminder of the price of freedom, independence and the importance of protecting human rights and dignity,” the ICRC emphasized.