Parliament on April 9 opened the once-secret Soviet and Communist Party archives that historians say will shed light on and help rid the nation of some of the darkest chapters of its past.
Part of a package of four decommunization laws, the measure further widens the gulf between Ukraine’s move toward democracy and Russia’s warring policy that justifies its Soviet legacy in part by keeping the same archives sealed from public view.
According to Vladyslav Hrynevych, a political scientist who specializes in the history of World War II, opening the archives will foster democracy taking root in Ukrainian society. “Russia remains stuck in the Soviet mythological heritage,” Hrynevych says.
“The additional incentive for such openness is the complete secrecy about the same archives in Russia,” he said. “Basically Ukraine has opened the doors for researchers of Stalinism and totalitarianism that are closed to them in Russia. Certainly, in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, it is a very important and necessary step. There is no wonder it caused panic in Moscow.”
A member of Russia’s State Duma, Vyacheslav Nikonov, said in a televised interview that “these archives will be declassified with only one goal – to demonize Moscow, to demonize Russia and to shift the responsibility for, as an example, the repression that was very severe in Ukraine because of the position of Ukraine’s authorities of that time.”
Three women suffering from the famine. Kharkiv, 1933.
The law stipulates that all documents of “repressive” Soviet agencies from 1917-1991 be turned over to the historical Ukrainian National Memory Institute, as well as be scanned and published online.
President Petro Poroshenko has yet to sign the law.
Repressive Soviet policies led to the murders of millions of Ukrainians who opposed the regime. A famine engineered by Soviet leader Josef Stalin and Communist Party leaders in Moscow in Kyiv alone starved to death at least three million Ukrainians in 1932-1933 during the Holodomor, which many Ukrainians regard as genocide. Millions more in 1917-1991 were sent to labor camps, shot or expelled from their homes never allowed to return for their political views.
Other new laws ban Communist and Nazi symbols as well as propaganda, and grant special status to all Ukrainian 20th century military organizations that fought for Ukrainian independence, including the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought Nazi and Soviet forces mostly in the western part of the country.
This isn’t the first time that authorities have tried to open access to Soviet archives. Access was first eased under Viktor Yushchenko, who was president from 2005 to 2010. His successor, Viktor Yanukovych, closed access again.
A girl suffers from the famine in Kharkiv in 1933.
Now, for example, Andrew Wozniac, who lives in the U.S. city of Cleveland, Ohio, says that he will be able to learn about his grandparents, who were Ukrainian and were arrested and sent to Siberia by the Soviet regime.
Wozniac is eager to learn when he can begin his research in the digitized archives. His parents didn’t reveal much about their family history, he says, because they were “scared of repercussions.”
However, there still a long way to go before he can access the documents.
According to Volodymyr Viatrovych, head of the Ukrainian Institute for National Memory and one of the authors of the bill, it will take at least a year to single out and systematize all the documents, as they have been stored in several different places and no one is sure how many in fact exist.
Millions of documents are now divided between the archives of the Security Service of Ukraine, the Interior Ministry, the Foreign Intelligence Service, and local state archives.
Documents from the Soviet era will be consolidated and kept at the Ukrainian Institute for National Memory in Kyiv.
After experts find the appropriate storage facility for the material, they will carefully move the documents under strict supervision, Viatrovych said.
“We will probably start solving the digitizing issue during this process,” Viatrovych said. “But even with the most modern scanners, we are talking about 30-40 years of scanning.”
In the meantime, it will still be possible to access the actual documents themselves. Researchers will need to show their passports and file requests.
But according to Viatrovych, it’s necessary to take the material away from the control of the current special services, depriving them of their own Soviet heritage.
A leaflet, produced by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, saying: “And for your hard work you will be rewarded with a starvation to death. Death to the tyrants – to Stalin and his gang.”
“It is also an element of the Security Service and Interior Ministry reforming,” he said.
Some archivists believe that access to the documents must be opened, but that the papers themselves should remain where they are.
Oleksandr Garanin of the Archivists Association of Ukraine believes that not all the documents will be found, especially in the provinces. Therefore, according to Garanin, it is not worth removing them because they might get damaged in the process of being moved.
Staff writer Alyona Zhuk can be reached at [email protected].
