One of the panels displays a photograph from the funeral of Sergei Kirov, who was assassinated on 1 December 1934 in Leningrad. This was an extraordinary event, because that very day a Central Executive Committee resolution was approved concerning the method of conducting criminal cases and the need to carry out death sentences within twenty–four hours. This document was, in fact, a “charter of terror” that was implemented in the USSR until its abolition in 1953.

Mass repressions of Ukrainian writers and university lecturers began in 1934. During 1933–34, pedagogy in Ukraine had suffered greatly, stemming from the savage criticism that was directed against “Skrypnyk’s followers” [Ukrainian Minister of Education Mykola Skrypnyk]. As a result, the sphere of education was thoroughly “purged.” Many teachers and writers began to “Ukrainianize” Siberia, the Solovetsky region, and Kazakhstan.

However, the most dramatic events lay ahead. In 1936 Mykola Yezhov, the former secretary of the Central Committee of the All–Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) and head of the Party Control Commission, was appointed head of the NKVD. Stalin instructed Yezhov to oversee the most odious punitive actions that were then being conducted in the USSR. This was the beginning of the “Yezhov era,” which lasted from 1936 to 1938. Yezhov’s first act was to destroy all former oppositionists, and a number of show trials of Trotskyites and right deviationists were held. However, Yezhov devoted particular attention to the existing camp–prison system. According to preliminary data, after his appointment in 1937 some 700–800 thousand people were arrested. The question arose: what to do with all these people. The system of GULAG camps, with masses of prisoners already working and producing material goods, could not cope with such a huge influx of new prisoners.

It was decided to establish new camps and convert large camps into small ones. Prisoners were now engaged in wood–processing tasks, which did not require any special qualifications. It was also decided to execute the most “entrenched enemies of Soviet power.” In the summer of 1937 nearly thirty thousand prisoners were shot. But the greatest number of executions still lay in the future, as attested by the increasing numbers of prisoners in the country, where an atmosphere of hysterical denunciations was reigning. Several large–scale punitive actions were conducted. One of them is presented in the documents displayed in panel 22. The first document bears Stalin’s signature, with which he blesses the creation of troikas [triumvirates of judges]. In this document, repressed individuals are divided into categories, e.g., the first category signifying “speedy execution.” Moscow was establishing ‘limits’ (essentially quotas), plans for executions by firing squad” for human lives as though they were no more than building materials–bricks, boards, or cement.

Next to the document establishing the troikas is another document with which the Politburo of the Central Committee extended these “limits” to national and oblast party organizations. Yezhov himself distributed these “limits” from the Moscow centre. The hunt for enemies of the people went so far afield that the republican party leadership, oblast party committees, and the Cheka leadership requested that their “limits” be increased to 6,000, 10,000 and 30,000 because the earlier designated “limit” was not sufficient to completely destroy all the “enemies of the people.” According to these documents, Moscow granted the highest “limit” to Ukraine. However, even this was not enough and the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR later requested that its “limit” be increased by five times. On the right side of this panel are displayed four such requests for increasing the “limits’for taking human lives.

One of these mass executions took place in October–November 1937 on Solovetsky Island, the site of one of the most terrible camps in the entire GULAG system. Here the whole Solovetsky prison was “purged.” The individual in charge of this action was the Chekist Leonid Zakovsky, who began his career in Ukraine. He headed the troika that was “purging” these camps, where 1,111 prisoners were sentenced to be shot. They were transported to the boundary line of Sandormokh, in Karelia, and over several days Capt. M. Matveev personally shot approximately 250 prisoners a day. Panel 22 displays documents drawn up by Matveev, “who announces in a report [the people] whom he has executed.”

The majority of the prison population in the Solovetsky camps was comprised of Ukrainians. On the lower section of this panel are execution protocols, individual cases, orders for arrest, and sentences. Renowned Ukrainian cultural figures, including Les Kurbas, Mykola Kulish, and many others, were executed in the Solovetsky camps. A detailed history of these camps, recounting the history of executions carried out there, is displayed in a separate exhibit consisting of fifteen panels.

Panel 24 displays documents and photographs of a site where the Communist regime carried out mass executions in the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia. The Vinnytsia tragedy comprises a separate page in the history of Ukraine. When the Germans occupied Ukraine, they formed a commission to begin excavations in Vinnytsia. A detailed account of this crime is the subject of a book published in Kyiv in 1997 entitled Zlochyn bez kary [English title: Crime without Punishment, Materials of the All–Ukrainian Conference on the “Great Terror” of Sorrowful Memory, Stylos Publishers], based on documents of the German commission. The panel lists the names of the members of the international commission of experts who carried out the excavations and determined that the executions in Vinnytsia took place during 1937–1939. According to the data, the commission excavated ninety–one burial sites in which were found the remains of 9,432 people, whose skulls showed bullet holes in the back of the head and their bodies displaying signs of torture. The panel also shows a plan of the Vinnytsia burials and the dates when the remains excavated in 1943 were reinterred. On this land in the postwar period, the Communist authorities created a “Park of Culture and Rest”, as well as a funhouse and other recreational establishments that are still in operation. In order to further conceal all traces of this crime, after the war the Chekists made a thorough search of Vinnytsia and the surrounding villages, arresting and killing those who had testified at the international commission in 1943.

The year 1938 was noteworthy in that Stalin made a decision “to change the little fishes in the party aquarium”–bidding farewell to Yezhov and assigning the blame for all the crimes on him. One of two photographs pictures Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov, and Yezhov on the Moscow–Volga Canal. In another (identical) photograph Yezhov is missing. The photograph was cropped. For, by 1939 he had already been arrested, and in February 1940 shot as a spy and leader of a counter–revolution. ary organization within the NKVD organs.

Panel 27 presents one of the two largest mass graves ever found in Ukraine, containing victims of repressions buried in Kyiv’s Luk’ianiv Cemetery. In this cemetery in the years 1918–19 were buried residents of Kyiv who had been executed by Muravev’s Bolshevik armies and Denikin’s forces. From December 1934 and throughout the entire period of the Great Terror people executed by the Bolsheviks were buried here. Since the cemetery was already full, the Bolsheviks buried their victims underneath the cemetery pathways and flowerbeds. These facts were concealed for many decades, but witnesses have now come forward with information that the Communist regime hid the traces of its crimes here.

The facts of these burials have also been confirmed by archival documents. The last mayor of Kyiv during the Nazi occupation Leontii Forostivsky also mentions them: “…Prior to moving the capital from the city of Kharkiv [in 1934] all those who had been executed [at the NKVD headquarters] were gen—erally buried in Luk’ianiv Cemetery: the main and side alleys, all the roads in this cemetery, are huge mass graves of murdered people. The burial places have been carefully leveled, and the earth well tamped. Whole glades are also sites of mass graves; they have been carefully leveled and plowed, and grass has been planted on them. There are no fewer than 25–30 thousand murdered people lying in this cemetery.”