Translated material
Tribute to political fashion
The Museum of Soviet Occupation is preparing Ukraine for elections
For a month now, scandals have not subsided around the Museum of Soviet Occupation , which was opened by the Kiev Memorial Society on May 26. Communists and socialists stage noisy protests outside the walls of a small two-story building located 40 minutes from the center of Kyiv. When approaching the museum, one notices gaping holes in the window glass from a huge boulder that flew to the second floor. Before opening the armored door, the Vremya Novostey correspondent is examined for a long time through the peephole.The exhibition is located in only two rooms. On the stands are photographs of peasant carts filled with corpses, NKVD reports of executions, human skulls with holes in the forehead, as well as photographs of victims of mass famine. In a narrow corridor hangs a map of the administration of concentration camps in the USSR, compiled based on materials from the American historian Robert Conquest. In Ukraine, only three departments are designated, while the territory of Russia is all dotted with red marks. “In the pre-war period, every tenth person in the USSR was behind bars,” says the guide.
The first section of the exhibition “Chronicles of the Communist Inquisition” covers the period from 1917 to 1930. Here are copies of documents ordering the creation of an institution of “hostages and defendants” in Bolshevik-controlled territory. The museum exposition claims that the first famine of 1921 in Ukraine was provoked by a resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (Bolsheviks) ordering an increase in grain procurements. The latter was taken from the peasants; in 1922, the infant mortality rate in Ukraine was 70%, as evidenced by the closed statistics presented in the museum from those times. Several stands are dedicated to the 10 million victims of the famine - photographs of children swollen from hunger, rural streets with dozens of uncleaned corpses, and maps of the affected areas are on display.
The topic of repression has not been forgotten either. The museum recalls that in 1925, at the command of the head of the Ukrainian GPU, most of the Jewish intelligentsia were exterminated in the five largest cities of the republic under the pretext of “fighting the activities of Zionist organizations.” Copies of petitions to increase the limits on repression sent to Moscow from the regional committees of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of a number of cities in Ukraine, as well as Yakutsk and Gorky, and resolutions of the “special troika” of the Solovetsky camps were exhibited.
A separate stand is dedicated to the places of mass graves of victims of communism. One of the largest mass graves is located in Bykovna, in the Darnitsky district of Kyiv. It contains about 100 thousand people who were executed in 1934-1937. The Soviet government erected a monument there to the “victims of Nazism.” In the 1980s, at the insistence of the relatives of the victims, the graves were opened and examined. It turned out that the victims had nothing to do with Nazism. The conclusions of the commissions that examined the mass grave in Bykivnya were confirmed by decisions of the Ukrainian government and parliament.
The next exhibition is "The Collusion of Two Dictatorships and Its Consequences", accompanied by a photograph of Stalin and Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop shaking hands after signing a non-aggression pact. Next to it is a quote from Ribbentrop’s telegram to Hitler: “Stalin and Molotov are very nice. I felt like I was among old party comrades.” The stand, dedicated to the last decade of the Stalinist dictatorship, talks about the formation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and its defeat by the communists. UPA leaflets were displayed - “Death to Hitler and Stalin! For a free Ukraine!” The museum has copies of documents about the formation of the NKVD detachments in 1944, which, in the form of the UPA, destroyed the local population. The topic of the resettlement of two hundred thousand Western Ukrainians to other regions of the USSR from 1944 to 1953, the deportation of many thousands of Crimean Tatars, Crimean Bulgarians and Poles, has not been forgotten.
The museum recalls the events in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the fight against dissidents under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. In 1961, members of the “Ukrainian Workers’ and Peasants’ Union” were imprisoned, including currently active well-known Ukrainian politicians. In 1965, after the premiere of Sergei Parajanov’s film “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” in Kyiv, Ukrainian poets and journalists were sent to pre-trial detention centers, including the poet Ivan Dzyuba and the famous politician Vyacheslav Chernovil, who organized a spontaneous rally against repression. The compilers of the exhibition recall the arrest of Andrei Sinyavsky and the proposal of KGB chief Yuri Andropov to send dissidents to psychiatric hospitals.
The last stand of the exhibition “Collapse of the Communist Regime. 1986-1991" talks about the special regime camps for dissidents operating at that time. It is reported that the mass release of Ukrainian political prisoners from Soviet camps took place only in 1988 - early 1990s. A place of honor in the “perestroika” exposition is given to Boris Yeltsin’s 1991 decree banning the CPSU and the democratic revolution in Russia, which “created the conditions for the realization of the rights of peoples to self-determination.” The final photo is Moscow during the August 1991 coup, one of the demonstrators climbed onto a tank with a Ukrainian yellow-blue flag in his hands.
“The opening of the museum is rather a tribute to a certain political fashion,” Ukrainian political scientist Vladimir Fesenko told Vremya Novostey. — The museum was opened almost immediately after, during Viktor Yushchenko’s visit to Georgia, information appeared about the existence of a similar museum there. The hype around the monuments of Soviet history in Estonia also played a role.” According to the expert, the actual start of the election campaign in the Parliament also played a role - early elections should take place in the fall. “The museum itself reflects rather the ideological position of its creators, since in Ukraine there are very different attitudes towards the period of communism,” our interlocutor recalls. For one half of the population, “this is truly a period of occupation,” for the other, “absolutely not.” Mr. Fesenko notes that “there is no agreement on this issue in society, and this topic can easily be used as a tool in the fight for votes.”