Panel 29 displays another symbol of Communist terror–Bykivnia, a large village located on the northeastern fringes of Kyiv near the Chernihiv highway. In 1936–1941 mass burials of people who had been repressed and executed by the NKVD organs in Kyiv took place here. The first victims, as a rule, were transported directly from Luk’ianivka Prison and were buried here in the late 1920s. Officially the construction of a special zone for secret burials began in 1936. From that time forward, executed victims of the Communist regime were systematically buried here in utter secrecy. Among the archival documents of the Kyiv planning and zoning commission is a document concerning a plot of land that was issued for special use by the Kyiv NKVD, which was located in Sectors 19 and 20 of the Darnytsia Forestry near the village of Bykivnia.

The first to write about the burial of victims of Communist terror in Bykivnia was P. Kolmus on the pages of Berliner Boersen–Zeitung in September 1941. At that time the Germans were carrying out their excavations, during which mangled human corpses were found buried a half–metre below the surface. Further excavations of the site measuring 15,000 square metres revealed that prisoners from Kyiv prisons, who had been shot at the start of the war, had also been hurriedly buried here.

In 1944–1945 a state commission working in Bykivnia to establish the facts pertaining to the evil actions of the German fascist invaders announced that it was victims of the Nazis who were buried in Bykivnia. In 1971 a second state commission began working on the burial site. It too concluded that the people buried in Bykivnia had been killed by the Germans. It was only in 1987 that, as a result of citizens’ initiatives and the assistance of the Union of Writers of Ukraine, the truth of the Bykivnia tragedy gradually began to emerge. Thus, a third state commission headed by the Minister of Internal Affairs was formed to conduct an investigation of the site, where the remains of victims had been found. Shortly afterwards, announcements began appearing in the mass media that a fascist concentration camp, where Soviet citizens had died, had been located in Bykivnia. In May 1988 the authorities official. ly sanctioned a monument, on whose central stone were engraved the words, “Eternal memory. Here lie 6,329 Soviet fighters, partisans, members of the underground, and civilians mur—dered by the fascist occupiers in 1941–1945.”

It was only after the appearance of numerous publications, which revealed the truth about Bykivnia, and especially after the creation of the Memorial Society that the authorities were forced to react by appointing a fourth state commission. After examining the facts and eyewitness testimonies, the commission was forced to admit that vic. tims of Communist repressions were buried in Bykivnia. On 11 July 1989 the press announced that the committee had concluded its work, having arrived at the figure of 6,783 victims. This figure is far from complete, according to researchers who estimate that the total number of victims is no less than 100,000. After the above–mentioned press announcement, in July 1989 the inscription on the stone in Bykivnia was removed, except for the words “Eternal memory.” On 10 May 1990 a large oak cross was erected in Bykivnia Forest, and in July 1990 workers from an enterprise based in the city of Brovary erected a half–ton panel at the edge of the highway, inscribed with the words, “Graves of the repressed–1 km.” On 30 April 1994 the Bykivnia Memorial Complex, erected on orders of the President of Ukraine, was officially opened.

One of the panels highlights a photograph of the October Palace, the headquar. ters of the NKVD in the 1930s, which until the events of 1917 housed the Institute of Young Noblewomen. Alongside is a photograph of the building that today houses the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine. This structure was originally built for the NKVD. A two–story, windowless building, where interrogations of prisoners were supposed to be conducted, was erected in its courtyard.

At the persistent demands and appeals of the Kyiv branch of the Memorial Society and the citizens of Kyiv, and with the assistance of the then prime minister of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko, on 22 May 2001 the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine issued a resolution entitled “Concerning the Creation of the State Historical–Memorial Preserve of the ‘Bykivnia Graves’”, which was to be placed under the jurisdiction of the Kyiv civic–state administration. On 24 June 2001, Pope John–Paul II visited Bykivnia during his visit to Ukraine. However, in the last two years the powerful ministerial structures have done nothing to implement the resolution approved by the government of Viktor Yushchenko.

The actions of the new Soviet govern. ment in the Western Ukrainian lands were brutal. To the inhabitants of these western lands, who had greeted their “liberators” with bread, salt, and national flags, the new rulers brought mass terror and secret burials of their victims in villages, towns, and cities.

Panel 30 shows Dem’ianiv Laz, a suburb of the city of Ivano–Frankivsk, another of the many mass burial sites located in Western Ukraine, where victims of Communist repressions have been found. Among the exhibited items are remnants of clothing and shoes of those who had been shot. Skulls with bullet holes at the back of the head are eloquent testimony to the way longstanding Bolshevik practices in eastern Ukraine were carried out in the western Ukrainian lands.

A comparison of the excavations in Dem’ianiv Laz in 1989 and the excavations in Vinnytsia in 1943 indicates that today’s excavations are carried out in a more proficient manner. These exhibits indisputably confirm the Bolshevik regime’s efforts to conceal all traces of their crimes.

The destruction of people in Dem’ianiv Laz reveals indisputable evidence of bla. tant sadism. Among the exhibits displayed in the panel is a skull with six bullet holes at the back of the head. Next to it are bones from the rib cages of victims who had been stabbed repeatedly with bayonets to ensure that the victim was dead. Today archival documents have revealed quite a few examples of the NKVD’s attempts to conceal its crimes or blame them on the Germans. During the excavations at Dem’ianiv Laz in 1989 the Ivano–Frankivsk oblast committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine attempted to blame these crimes on the Germans or “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.” But documents found during the excavations put an end to this attempt to falsify the evidence. In addition, the holes in the rib cages clearly indicate that they had been made by angled cruciform bayonets, which in those days were used exclusively by Russian troops.

The excavations of Dem’ianiv Laz juridically confirmed the crimes of the punitive system of the time, which also included violations of existing inhumane Soviet laws, specifically article 98 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR of 1927: exceeding authority, or functional authority, i.e., the commission of actions that clearly exceed the boundaries of authority granted by law to individuals committing them. Under article 98, senior investigators in the procurator’s office in Ivano–Frankivsk oblast initiated and investigated a criminal case of the crimes committed in Dem’ianiv Laz. Newly discovered documents reveal that the victims had been sentenced from two to five years’imprisonment or were simply arrested and transported to Dem’ianiv Laz and summarily executed. During the excavations activists from the Memorial Society began distributing leaflets containing texts of unearthed documents, complete with the signatures of the NKVD agents who had signed them. As a result, dozens of families of former NKVD personnel fled to the Russian Federation in an effort to evade the peoples’ wrath.