“Bykivnia Archipelago”

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has held a new public hearing to publicize declassified documents on the “Bykivnia Archipelago,” which the Soviet government had established to systematically and purposefully exterminate participants in the liberation movement and those whom the communist authorities considered security risks.

This Ukrainian analogue of the Gulag Archipelago comprised 18 places all over Ukraine, patterned on the mass grave in the Bykivnia woods near Kyiv. As a rule, the Kremlin government carefully hid and camouflaged all these places, kept secret the names of victims, and would often destroy the perpetrators “in the next batch” in order to conceal the true scale of the repressions. As of today, the SBU has identified the names of 14,191 people sentenced in Kyiv and buried at Bykivnia. It is next to impossible now to say how many victims were buried in the Bykivnia woods.

The first speaker at the public hearings “The Tragedy of Bykivnia: The Way It Was,” Prof. Vasyl Danylenko, a Doctor of History employed at the SBU State Departmental Archive, reported that executions of political prisoners began at Bykivnia back in 1936. Yet what is considered the official opening date of this burial ground is March 20, 1937, when the Kyiv City Council presidium resolved to set aside and mark out four hectares of the Bykivnia woodland “for special needs of the Ukrainian SSR’s NKVD.” All this territory was enclosed with a high fence and barbed wire; an access road and a guardhouse were built. “We are sure that Bykivnia was chosen as a mass burial place not just by chance — it was a deliberate and well-planned action,” Danylenko emphasized.

Some time later, the bodies of those executed by the decision of courts and out-of-court institutions (the so-called “threes” and “twos,” i.e., special mobile USSR and Ukrainian SSR NKVD committees) began to be delivered here under strict guard. Sentences were carried out in the basement of the Kyiv Oblast NKVD Directorate, now Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, at 16 Lypska St.

Interior Minister Yezhov’s telegram of July 4, 1937, sparked a mass-scale terror of 1937–38 throughout the USSR, including Ukraine, which claimed tens of thousands of human lives. Every night 100 to 150 people would be shot and taken to Bykivnia, their last resting place, where they were buried in the already dug-out pits — several dozens in each. On the eve of the Soviet-German war in early 1941, convicts were shot dead right near the pits in the woods: that year saw a new wave of mass-scale terror.

As was mentioned above, the “Bykivnia Archipelago” spread out all over Ukraine. Eighteen burial grounds of the victims of the 1937–40 mass-scale political repressions, similar to the one at Bykivnia, have been discovered as of today. Among them is the place in Khmelnytsky, where a department store was built later, a recreation park in Vinnytsia, the 9th kilometer of the Zaporizhia Highway, the central cemetery in Sumy, and the 2nd Christian cemetery in Odesa.

“Those places were closely guarded. At different times they hosted top-security KGB facilities and construction sites. The 2.5-meter-deep graves were filled with concrete, the locality was leveled off by bulldozers, and trees were planted. In Kharkiv, this place was under guard and listed as a graveyard of German deserters and those who died of infectious diseases (typhoid, cholera, and syphilis) so that people kept clear of it,” Danylenko said.

The secret of the Bykivnia tragedy was revealed during the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, when the Germans carried out excavations in the presence of news reporters. Then the press published the first articles on the Bolshevik terror against their own populace. When Kyiv was liberated, Bykivnia became a taboo subject again, and in 1944 the Soviet government set up a commission that concluded that the village of Bykivnia was a place near which inmates of the Darnytsia POW camp were buried.

The Bykivnia tragedy was again in the limelight during the Khrushchev thaw, when, owing to the efforts of Ukrainian intellectuals, a commission was established in 1962 to investigate the Bykivnia burial grounds, but the thaw was soon over, leaving the set goal unachieved. A second governmental investigative commission was set up in 1971, but it also concluded that those lying in the Bykivnia graveyard were victims of the Nazi German invaders.

The Bykivnia case saw changes during Gorbachev’s perestroika. Although the third governmental commission, set up in 1987, produced the same result as the second one did, the fourth commission, established in 1988, arrived at an altogether different conclusion: the 19th and 20th sectors of the Darnytsia forest hold the remains of the communist regime’s victims.

However, the second speaker, Candidate of Sciences (History) Oleh Bazhan, a senior research associate at the Institute of History (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine), is convinced that, “to find out the true scale of the repressions, it is necessary to declassify and make public not only documents of the SBU State Departmental Archive but also the results of the investigations conducted by several governmental commissions and an investigative group of the Ukrainian SSR’s procurator’s office, which inquired into the Bykivnia tragedy in the 1970s and the 1980s.”

As Ukraine proclaimed its independence, the Bykivnia tragedy began to draw much more attention, especially on the part of Kyiv’s public. A joint effort of the government and the public made it possible to erect the Monument to the Repressed Political Prisoner on Brovarsky Avenue in 1995.

On May 22, 2001, the Viktor Yushchenko-headed Cabinet of Ministers passed the resolution “On Establishing the Bykivnia Graves State Historical and Memorial Preserve,” and on May 17, 2006, President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine decreed to grant the facility the status of a national preserve. It is also thanks to the Kyiv public’s efforts that victims of communist repressions are now honored every year, and on May 21, 2007, the president decreed to mark Day of Memory for Victims of Political Repressions on the third Sunday of May (May 17 this year) on the territory of the Bykivnia Graves preserve. As Roman Krutsyk, head of the Kyiv oblast branch of the Memorial society, emphasized, “It is necessary to take the next important step — to ameliorate the Bykivnia Graves memorial preserve, which needs constant governmental support.”

Therefore, the decision of the SBU State Departmental Archive to declassify and make public the Bykivnia tragedy-related documents was another step in opening the unknown pages of Ukrainian history that testify to the courage of the Ukrainian people and the atrocities of the totalitarian regime.