Is Bykivnia a symbol of decommunization in Ukrainian society?
We have two significant anniversaries this year, separated by two decades. What makes them similar somewhat is the fact that they launched a series of important events.
Thus, the February revolution opened the road for fateful events in Ukraine and we are marking its 90th anniversary. Regrettably, events took place toward the end of 1917 that must be remembered, not celebrated. The Bolsheviks came to power in Petrograd in November. In December they established a powerful body of state security, the All- Russia Emergency Commission, or VChK [generally known as the Cheka], meant to destroy or isolate all dissenters. Two decades later a plenary meeting of the CC VKP(b) was held in February-March 1937. Its resolutions signaled the launch of a “cleanup” throughout the country where Stalin’s socialism now reigned. Month after month the Cheka/NKVD methodically closed their cases of “enemies of the people” using the most simple method of mass shootings.
In big cities thousands were massacred and the authorities found themselves faced with a serious problem: what to do with the material evidence, bodies? The NKVD leadership decided to bury them in the suburbs and place the sites under special control. It was thus Kuropaty appeared at Minsk, the Butovsky proving ground at Moscow, and Bykivnia at Kyiv. With time the security details were withdrawn and no one seemed to remember the victims. When the Wehrmacht occupied a part of the Soviet territory the Nazis tried to the demonstrate to the rest of the world the scope of Stalin’s atrocities (particularly in Vinnytsia and Katyn). The Soviet media immediately blamed the Nazis for the mass executions.
A specific situation developed with Bykivnia. It is safe to assume that the populace promptly put two and two together and knew what all those NKVD trucks were bringing to a fenced-off site in the Bykivnia forest. Yet the subject started being discussed only in the spring of 941. In 1944 the Bykivnia graves were qualified by a Soviet war crimes commission as ones belonging to inmates of the Darnytsia [Nazi] POW camp. The picture looked convincing because the camp was located nearby where 75,000 Red Army officers and man had died. However, talk about mass shootings prior to the war continued. In 1971 a new governmental commission studied Bykivnia. It confirmed the findings of the previous one. Ditto the third commission that studied the place in 1987. To make the picture even more convincing, a gravestone was placed with the legend, “Buried here are Soviet soldiers, partisans, and civilians massacred by the fascist aggressor in 1941-43.”
However, a different political situation was unfolding in the country and the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR ordered to study the Bykivnia burial site again in 1988. The graves turned out to contain the remains of victims of purges before WW II.
Seventy years separate us from the Great Terror. There are practically no survivors of witnesses of that terror left in the postcommunist countries, yet our memories remain. On May 19, Patriarch Aleksii and Metropolitan Lavr, head of the Russian Orthodox Church abroad, consecrated the Temple of New Russian Martyrs on the Butovsky proving ground. On May 20, Viktor Yushchenko took part in a mourning ceremony by the national historical memorial preserve Bykivnia Graves.
The 70th anniversary of the Great Terror makes one wonder whether our society will be decommunized before the last generation of graduates of the Soviet political school step down from the stage.
We can understand now that decommunization started in the Soviet Union a long time ago Last year historians concentrated on the 50th anniversary of the 20th Congress of the CPSU. This event can be regarded as the launch of the process.
The beginning turned out to be very cautious as the topic at the time was the struggle against the cult of Stalin’s personality. The second stage of the campaign, tagged by historians as destalinization, fell on the period of Gorbachev’s perestroika. The last Communist Party General Secretary failed to adjust the communist doctrine, party, and sociopolitical order to the challenges of the modern times. However, a number of “birthmarks” of communisms remained in the countries that rose from the debris of the Leninist-Stalinist empire.
Ukraine perhaps has the greatest number of these birthmarks. Last year the Communist Party joined the governmental coalition. Facts show that this allows this party to obscure the memories about the heinous crimes of the Soviet epoch, including by providing conditions in which it is possible to introduce corrections in modern school history textbooks.
Let us hope that the unnatural alliance between the Communists, Socialists and the Party of Regions will sooner or later lose its political meaning. This, however, does not promise quick success in the decommunization process. It must be understood that people living in various regions of Ukraine have different historical memories. Whereas those in the western regions have a strong immunity to communism, inoculated by mass postwar repressions, people in the southeast often harbor nostalgic memories. Even the older generation here did not suffer from repressions that accompanied the formation of the Soviet system. In the minds of many residents of these districts communism is associated with Soviet propaganda proclaiming social equality, paternalism by the state that was the main factor of the socioeconomic order and with which many were quite content.
More often than not the point in question is the older generation. These people refuse to accept the realities of initial capitalism in which we all of us found ourselves after the Soviet Union’s collapse. They do not realize that there is no returning to the past and that it is a long way to the future embodied by Europe. Precisely these moods among the Ukrainian electorate are being supported by political parties rooted in the CPSU, thus throwing monkey wrenches into the works of decommunization.
Finally, it should be stressed that to try to decommunize this society by anticommunist propaganda would be futile. The communist doctrine in its abstract form does not have a single negative element. However, a body politic built on this doctrine will always be a threat to man’s freedom, even life. This is evidenced by the historical experience of several dozen countries. Final decommunization depends primarily on a successful implementation of the European standards regulating economic and political life; second, on an effective treatment of the historical memory of all those graduates of the Soviet school, using educational means.
Attempts by modern communists to edit the Holodomor and Bykivnia out school textbooks are doomed, among other things because these and other crimes of the Soviet regime can no longer be hushed up. However, it is necessary for all citizens to become aware of the in-depth reasons for these atrocities and their regular nature in conditions of dictatorship. Then the problem of renaming Dniprodzerzhynsk — so as to leave no mention of Dzerzhynsky, the founder of the Cheka — will be solved automatically. Final decommunization is possible only after business and political competition are finally asserted in our society as the main factors of democracy.
