The Bolsheviks followed two political–strategic lines–industrialization and collectivization. Everything began expressly with industrialization, for which the Bolsheviks tried to claim all the credit for themselves. However, there was a serious reassessment of values once the true cost of this industrialization became known. This process was achieved at the cost of hundreds of thousands of people, primarily peasants, who were press–ganged into working on huge con– struction sites. More than 100,000 labourers perished just during the building of the “magnificent Magnitka”, the steel–producing city of Magnitogorsk.

Forcible collectivization was also carried out during this period. Thesem panels show unique photographs that show farms being destroyed and grain forcibly confiscated from the peasants.

During this period the Bolshevik leadership was discussing various approaches to these questions, and Stalin’s line of forcible collectivization was subjected to criticism. But Stalin realized that if he did not make a speedy breakthrough “to strengthen the material base and industry,” he would forfeit his power. Therefore he made a fundamental change in his political line and created the slogan, “Building socialism in a single country.” A number of widely promoted show trials then took place in the USSR, the goal of which was to mobilize the society to carry out the appointed tasks simply and without question. One of these trials was the “Shakhty case”, which is recounted in the displayed documents and a book entitled People–Wreckers. This case, whose name derives from the Ukrainian city of Shakhty, involved the show trial of a group of engineers accused of sabotaging production, and became the symbol of an entire era. By July 1928 Stalin was calling for a “search for Shakhty wreckers” in all spheres of life, i.e., he gave the signal to millions of Soviet citizens to seek out terrorists and wreckers in their midst. The GPU organs seized upon this slogan, implementing it in a highly efficient manner.

It must be stressed that the entire exposition is based exclusively on archival materials and documents. Panel no. 12 features original documents and individual cases drawn up by Cheka personnel, their letters of attestation, decrees, and service cards. This documentation demonstrates the deliberate manner with which cadres were selected for work in these punitive organs. Displayed on the upper right–hand side of the panel is the “Proposition concerning the NKVD” of 24 May 1922, which describes the wide–ranging powers that were granted to this punitive organ. The Bolsheviks carried out their repressive actions under conditions of profound secrecy. Media censors were at work everywhere– from the centre all the way down to the tiniest village. The lower part of the panel displays extracts from the protocol of a meeting of the collegium of the OGPU USSR concerning the case of the “Ukrainian National Centre.” The fate of fifty innocent people was decided during one such meeting.

One of the most significant cases of this period was that of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine [SVU], whose participants are represented in the exposition. There is a portrait of the academician Serhii Yefremov, a renowned literary scholar and the vice–president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. The list of his published works includes more than 4,000 titles. Yefremov was accused of supporting foreign intervention, organizing murders of Communists, and heading the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine. During this show trial forty–five people were sentenced, seven hundred were arrested, and a total of thirty thousand people in Ukraine were repressed in connection with the SVU case.

In fabricating political criminal cases, the Bolsheviks assigned flamboyant code names to these cases in an attempt to circulate information concerning “enemies of the people.” An example of this is displayed on panel 15– the so–called “Hrenadery” case that was initiated against Ukrainian teachers in the Poltava region. In the centre of the panel is a photograph picturing the Chekist leaders of the construction of the Belomor Canal, where tens of thousands of prisoners perished. In the upper left corner of the panel is a photograph of the participants of an all–Union meeting of court–procuratorial staffers, the very people who were administering so–called “Communist justice”. Pictured in the first row, seventh from left, is the chief Stalinist procurator Andrei Vyshinsky.

There is also a photograph of Col. Yevhen Konovalets, the leader of the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO), who became the head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in 1929. Nine years later, in 1938, the NKVD agent Pavel Sudoplatov assassinated Konovalets in Rotterdam. The Bolsheviks annihilated their ideological opponents by terror methods, which were enshrined as state policy and carried out even against leading Ukrainian political figures outside of Ukraine.