Hit List: The Executions of Ukrainian Writers
…Poets reserve the right,
While waiving all other rights:
To be among those who are killed
And not those who kill in cold blood.
Leonid Pervomayskyi
On the morning of December 18, 1934, the wives of writers Hryhorii Kosynka and Oleksa Vlyzka arrived at the NKVD prison in Kyiv for a routine visit. They had been bringing care packages for over a month and hoped to see their husbands. The family members of the other detainees greeted them, hesitated, and left. No one dared to show these two women the newspaper. Sometime after lunch, someone was sent to tell them there was no one left to wait for…
This was the first time writers had been handed death sentences — an entire group of them no less. Previously, staged trials of the “creative intelligentsia” ended with punishment in labor camps or exile.
First “sentences executed”
On the aforementioned date of December 18, 1934, the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR in Kyiv in the case of the White Guard terrorists (members of the resistance who supported the overthrown government of Tsarist Russia) was all over the papers. From December 13 to 15, the visiting session of this collegium, chaired by Vasiliy Ulrikh, heard the cases of 37 individuals accused of organizing and preparing acts of terrorism against representatives of the Soviet government.
Vasiliy Ulrikh was one of the chief executors of Stalin’s repressions. In February 1924, he joined the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR as presiding judge, and in January 1926 he was promoted to chairman, a position he held for 22 years (until 1948).
Following a rigged trial in Kyiv, the Collegium ruled to execute 31 people and confiscate their property. The cases of another nine individuals were sent for further investigation. These nine defendants were ultimately given long sentences at labor camps from which only the poet and translator Vasyl Mysyk (1907-1983) would eventually be released.
Among those sentenced to execution were 11 individuals from the literary community, including well-known and emerging writers, translators, and editors. Brothers Ivan and Taras Krushelnytskyi, Oleksa Vlyzko, Hryhoriy Kosinka, Dmytro Falkivskyi, Kost Bureviy, Mykhailo Lebedynets, Roman Shevchenko, Roman Skazynskyi…
At the bottom, below the list of those sentenced to execution, were two chilling words: “Sentences executed.” There was no possibility to appeal. For their families, neither bribes nor pleading were of any use in their attempts to find out where the executed were buried.
The youngest of the lot was the bright and talented futurist poet Oleksa Vlyzko (barely 26 years old), whose poetry collection had recently been released by a major publishing house. As a result of an illness when he was a teen, Oleksa lost his hearing and later the ability to speak. He heard neither the command to fire nor the ensuing gunshot.
“Murder of an entire generation”
The first case to make headlines was the fictitious Union for the Liberation of Ukraine [SVU], where political, social, and church figures shared the dock with literati and critics, including Serhiy Yefremov, Andriy Nikovsky, playwright Liudmyla Starytska-Cherniakhivska, and novelist Mykhailo Ivchenko. The SVU trial took place in Kharkiv from March 9 to April 19, 1930. This trial was entirely for show, and the first of many intended to intimidate and instill a sense of danger and fear in the public.
On May 12, 1933, (poet) Mykhailo Yalovy was arrested in Kharkiv’s “Slovo,” a building inhabited by families of writers and artists. The following day, Mykola Khvilovyi (one of the leaders of the Ukrainian cultural revival of the 1920s) shot himself in the same building. His suicide note read as follows: “Yalovy’s arrest is the murder of an entire generation. For what? Because we were the most sincere communists? I don’t understand.” And: “The responsibility for the actions of Yalovy’s generation lies with me, Mykola Khvyliovyi.”
As a generational leader, Khvyliovyi understood that he could no longer be responsible for this generation, as he had no answer to the question “For what?” He also understood perfectly well that there was no solution, and that if there are people who come to you, then there are people who will come for you. Even if he shot himself in the temple, it was the Soviet authorities that killed him.
The question “For what?” had no answer. The system eradicated everything national, freedom-loving, dissenting, or capable of leadership. Just to be Ukrainian was already a sentence in itself, and to be a Ukrainian writer, all the more so.
The first arrests took place in the spring of 1933 and continued into the summer and fall. This was another majorly fabricated trial, this time of the Ukrainian Military Organization. Some of those arrested were sentenced to death, including writers Oles Dosvitnyi and Serhiy Pylypenko. The rest were sent to camps, mainly Solovki. Among them is the most popular writer of the 1920s, humorist Ostap Vyshnia.
The Great Purge began in December 1934 with the assassination of Sergei Kirov, secretary of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) (All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)). The so-called case of the Borotbists contained 12 volumes and covered three cities: Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Poltava. And it had more writers than it did politicians. Every one of them — Mykola Kulish, Hryhorii Epik, Valerian Pidmohylnyi, Yevhen Pluzhnyk, Valerian Polishchuk, Vasyl Vrazhlyvyi, Petro Vanchenko, and others — was sentenced to 10 years of correctional labor camps. Most were sent to the Solovki Special Camp (on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea). Having contracted tuberculosis, Pluzhnyk died in the camp infirmary on February 2, 1936.
On August 5, 1937, the resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) “On anti-Soviet Elements” came into force. This time he was immediately sentenced to death. At the end of October, founder and leader of the Ukrainian Futurists Mykhailo Semenko was shot in Kyiv, followed by the writer Maik Yohansen one week later. Both are buried in a mass grave in the Bykivnia forest (on the outskirts of Kyiv). Additionally, there was Volodymyr Yaroshenko, a trio of humorists — Vasyl Chechvianskyi (born Hubenko), Yuriy Vukhnal (born Ivan Kovtun), and Yukhym Gedz (born Oleksiy Savytskyi) — Ivan Malovichko and over a dozen other writers.
Following this decree, in the fall of 1937, previously arrested individuals were executed not only in Kyiv, but also in Kharkiv, Solovki, and Sandarmokh. Penitentiaries and camps were vacated en masse to make room for new prisoners.
On November 3, 1937, 265 prisoners of the Solovki Special Prison, including 15 Ukrainian writers, artists, and scientists, were shot in the Sandarmokh forest in the Karelia region of northwestern Russia. These included Mykola Kulish, Les Kurbas, Mykola Zerov, Pavlo Filipovych, Valerian Pidmohylnyi, Oleksa Slisarenko, and others. The executions lasted four days (November 1 to 4), during which a total of 1,111 people were killed.
On December 20, 1937, on the order of the NKVD in the Leningrad region, Mikhail Matveyev, captain of state security and head of the sentencing brigade at the White Sea-Baltic camp complex in Sandarmokh, was awarded a commemorative radiogram with a set of records for his selfless work in the struggle against the counter-revolution. Most of the executions were carried out personally together with junior lieutenant Georgi Alafer, who died in Leningrad in 1971.
Sites of mass executions in 1934-1940
1,111 people executed, including 203 from Ukraine (Ukrainians, Jews, Russians).
Among them are 23 writers, including Les Kurbas.
Location of mass executions and communal graves from the early 1920s until 1940. More specifically, in November-December 1937, several groups of Solovki prisoners were shot here.
Writers Geo Shkurupiy and Vasyl Vrazhlyvy were also killed here.
14 people were executed, including 11 writers. A total of 28 individuals were shot in this particular case. Place of interment unknown.
(prisoners were actually shot and buried here until 1941, but figures are available only for 1937-1938). The names of 20,000 executed prisoners have been established, including 20 writers
Writers Oles Dosvitnyi and Serhiy Pylypenko executed by firing squad. Place of interment unknown.
2,746 people lie in 60 graves. Additionally, 3,809 Polish officers and 500 Polish civilians were shot and buried here in 1940.
Hnat Khotkevytch died here.
“The Executed Renaissance”
Such was the name of the anthology compiled by literary critic Yurii Lavrinenko and published in Paris in 1959. This was an attempt to tell the story of the 1920s as a period in the history of Ukrainian literature. The anthology features texts and short biographies of prominent representatives of the time.
At the same time, it was the first attempt to put together a martyrology of Ukrainian literary figures of the 1920s. Most of the biographies end with a sentence about the individual’s arrest by the GPU-NKVD. Further information is mostly conjectural and fanciful, unless the execution was officially announced in the press. The real truths had yet to be uncovered.
Determining how many literary figures and artists perished is difficult, if not impossible. Various attempts were therefore made to establish the exact number killed by Soviet authorities. For example, the association of Ukrainian writers in exile “Slovo” counted the number of repressed writers based on their publications in the early and late 1930s. In December 1954, these statistics were sent to the Second All-Union Congress of Writers in Moscow. According to “Slovo” data, 259 Ukrainian writers were published in 1930, of which a mere 36 (13.9%) were still active on the literary scene in 1938. “We request that the MGB find out where and why 223 writers disappeared from Ukrainian literature,” stated Ukrainian political émigrés at the Congress.
The “Slovo” presidium published its explanation in the press. “According to rough estimates (as exact calculations are still impossible), the figure of 223 Ukrainian writers who died in the USSR can be broken down as follows: executed: 17; committed suicide: 8; arrested, sent to camps or removed from literature by other police measures (including those who were shot and died in concentration camps): 175; disappeared: 16; died of natural causes: 7” (Lavrinenko, “The Executed Renaissance”).
Oleksa Musienko, compiler of the martyrology “Z poroha smerti…” (From the brink of death…) (Radianskyi Pysmennyk, 1991), took a different figure as a starting point. In June 1934, a congress was held at which the Union of Soviet Writers of Ukraine was founded. The admissions committee considered over 400 applications and recommended to approve 120 persons as members of the Union and another 73 persons as intern candidates. So, as of mid-1934, 193 individuals in Ukraine were considered professional writers.
The number of repressed writers (Report by the Slovo Association, 1954)
“Suppressed Renaissance”
The 20th Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers of Ukraine (February 14-25, 1956) was immediately followed by the beginning of the “Thaw” and rehabilitation processes. The families of assassinated writers received death certificates with falsified dates and causes of death. After due analysis, it turns out that the majority of those arrested during the Great Purge died of heart disease, and practically all within a short period (1942-1943).
The Soviet government diligently covered up its crimes, as new ones lay ahead and the people had to be kept living in fear and submission. To do so, old methods were applied and new methods were invented: Now, instead of being shot, they were suppressed.
The truth gradually came to light, sometimes in unexpected ways. At an evening event of Kyiv’s Creative Youth Club in 1962, film director Les Tanyuk was approached by a woman who excitedly told him that Kyiv had its very own Solovki: the Bykivnia forest. Members of the Club’s commission investigating crimes of “Stalin’s period of lawlessness” — Les Tanyuk, artist Alla Horska, poet Vasyl Symonenko — traveled to the site. The latter was amazed to see children playing football (soccer) near the forest using bullet-riddled human skulls for a ball. Based on the results of the trip, Tanyuk filed a request to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine.
Inevitably, the generation that decided to learn the truth and tell the world became another victim of the regime. In the same summer of 1962, Vasyl Symonenko was brutally beaten by police at a train station. After that, the poet’s health deteriorated sharply and he complained of internal organ pain. In September 1963, doctors diagnosed him with kidney cancer. The poet was operated on, but died in December of the same year. In November 1970, Alla Horska died at the hands of unknown assassins.
The “Thaw” came to an end, and the period that would later become known as the “Era of Stagnation” began. The authorities resumed their repressive methods of subjugating society. In September 1965, the first wave of arrests took place, with 25 representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia imprisoned on the instructions of Moscow.
In the summer of 1971, Moscow undertook an active campaign against self-publishing with the goal of bringing production and distribution to a halt. A secret party resolution “On measures to counter the illegal distribution of anti-Soviet and other politically harmful material” was adopted. Soon, members of the intelligentsia began to face arrest. The KGB targeted literary critics Ivan Svitlychnyi, Ivan Dziuba, Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, poets Vasyl Stus, Iryna Kalynets, Ihor Kalynets, and Mykola Kholodny, to name a few.
Some made forced confessions. Svitlychnyi, Stus, and both Iryna and Ihor Kalynets were sentenced to seven years of imprisonment in hard labor camps and five years of exile in Russia’s Mordovia and Perm regions. The poet Vasyl Ruban was sentenced to forced treatment in a psychiatric hospital on trumped-up charges of “treason against the Motherland.” Taras Melnychuk spent time in camps, in addition to being subjected to repressive psychiatry.
See also: Discipline and Punish: The Practice of Punitive Psychiatry Against Dissidents
Vasyl Stus: poet and “particularly dangerous criminal”
Poet Vasyl Stus was first arrested in January 1972, and in September the Kyiv regional court sentenced him to five years in prison and three years of exile on charges of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” In the fall of 1979, the poet returned to Kyiv and joined the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights. He was free for a brief period. In May 1980, he was arrested again. Three months later, as a particularly dangerous repeat offender, he was sentenced to ten years of forced labor and five years of exile.
In November, Stus was sent to a high-security forced labor colony for “particularly dangerous state criminals” in the Russian village of Kuchino (Chusovsky district, Perm region). This camp was commonly known as “Perm-36.”
Despite being forbidden from seeing his family, Stus found other ways to get his texts to the West. In January 1983, he was sentenced to one year of solitary confinement for sneaking out a notebook filled with his poetry. On several occasions, Stus went on hunger strikes to protest the brutal treatment of political prisoners and the arbitrary nature of the camp’s administration. On August 28, 1985, he was put in solitary confinement again. In protest, he declared a dry hunger strike for an indefinite period. On the night of September 4, Vasyl Stus died in his cell. Officially, it was reported that the poet died of cardiac arrest. He was buried in the camp’s graveyard without any family in attendance.
In the fall of 1989, the poet’s remains were transferred to Kyiv and reinterred. The following year, the verdicts of both of his cases were appealed. The judge overseeing the cases disregarded the poet’s manuscripts (notes, sketches), which might have hindered rehabilitation given that these works would likely have condemned Stus to multiple sentences. Stus was rehabilitated posthumously. It wasn’t until 2019 that the seized papers were archived and added to the poet’s foundation.
Words as weapons
Mykola Khvylovy and Hryhir Tiutiunnyk committed suicide. In their respective prison cells, Arkady Kazka and Borys Teneta also took their own lives. But at the same time, they, too, were murdered, just like those who were executed in torture chambers, camps, and prisons, in Sandarmokh and in Bykivnia.
This was a covert war, whereas now Russia is killing Ukrainian writers at the front and in the rear with bullets, bombs, and missiles. Those who picked up a gun and went to battle, and those who fight for freedom with the only weapon they have: words.
Volodymyr Vakulenko lived with his parents and autistic son in the village of Kapitolivka (Izyum district, Kharkiv region). Russian terrorists occupied the village on March 7, 2022, two weeks after the invasion. The writer was arrested on March 24 and never heard from again. Six months later, on September 10, the Armed Forces of Ukraine liberated the town of Izyum, and on September 15, a mass burial site was discovered. Occupying forces had killed and buried over 400 people in the forest near the city. Vakulenko’s body was buried at gravesite № 319. He was killed with two pistol shots.
From the first moments of the invasion, the writer kept a diary. A few days before he was arrested, he buried it in his backyard. Vakulenko’s parents informed writer Victoria Amelinia about this when she came to Kapitolivka after the village was liberated. Following the family’s instructions, Victoria located the diary, which was one of the first testimonies of the occupation. Several dozen densely written pages were deciphered and, with Vakulenko’s parents’ consent, published. Victoria authored the foreword to the book.
On June 27, 2023, Russian terrorists launched a missile attack on the city of Kramatorsk. At the time, Amelina was in the city with a delegation of Colombian journalists and writers. The missile struck the restaurant where they had gathered for dinner. Severely injured, Victoria was taken to a hospital in Dnipro where she succumbed to her wounds on July 1. Volodymyr Vakulenko and Victoria Amelina died not at the front, but with weapons in their hands: their words.
In total, over one hundred writers, poets, novelists, and translators have lost their lives in the battles for Ukraine, for our freedom and for yours, including Maksym Petrenko, Yuriy Ruf, Serhiy Skald, Hlib Babich, Serhiy Zaikovskyi, Ilya Chernilevskyi, Oleksandr Menshov, Ihor Mysiak, Maksym Kryvtsov, Vasyl Palamarchuk, Oleksiy Ivakin, Taras Ilya, and others.
The project “Unwritten” is the brainchild of Olena Herasymiuk and Yevhen Lir, and is dedicated to the memory of literary figures who have died as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The authors of the project are collecting stories, works, and memories of the departed so that their voices may continue to be heard.
Remembering
Dead poems and unborn rhymes are images used by Leonid Pervomayskyi in his poetry. “The gray-haired poet cries like a child” over them, for he did not have enough time to create. In demographic statistics, there is the notion of direct and indirect losses: Direct human losses refer to those who have died or been killed while indirect losses correspond to those who were never born as a result of political and social upheaval in which their potential fathers and mothers lost their lives.
How can we calculate how many poems have perished, how many rhymes were not born into Ukrainian literature, because their creators were killed, forcefully silenced, or committed suicide?
The need to remember remains. The voices of the innocently murdered can be heard in the pages of their books, on the stage, and on the screen. They resonate in different languages in different countries and on different continents. Through translation, we use their voices to tell the world about our past and our present, about our struggle for human rights and values. About the struggle of the civilized world against chaos, evil, and injustice. A struggle in which our memory is also a weapon.
Author: Yaryna Tsymbal
Translation: David Soares
Copy editing: Terra Friedman King
Literature:
- Rozstriliane Vidrodzhennia: Antolohiia 1917–1933 (available in English under the title The Executed Renaissance: Anthology 1917-1933) / comp. Yurii Lavrinenko. — Paris, Munich: Kultura, 1959. — 980 p.
- Obirvani struny: Antolohiia poeziyi rozstrilianykh, zamuchenykh i zaslanykh. 1920-1945 / ed. Bohdan Kravtsiv. — New York, 1955. — 430 p.
- “Z poroha smerti…”: Pysmennyky Ukrayiny — zhertvy stalinskykh represiy / comp. Oleksa Musienko. — Kyiv: Radianskyi Pysmennyk, 1991. — Vol. 1. — 494 p.
- Ivan Ilіenko. U zhornakh represiy: Opovidi pro ukrayinskykh pysmennykiv (za arkhivamy DPU-NKVS). — Kyiv: Veselka, 1995. — 447 p.
- Ostannia adresa: Do 60-richchia solovetskoyi trahediyi. 3 volumes. — Kyiv: Sfera, 1997-1999.
- Sprava Vasylia Stusa. Zbirka dokumentiv z arkhivu kolyshnioho KDB URSR (available in English under the title The case of Vasyl Stus. A collection of documents from the archive of the former KGB of the Ukrainian SSR) / comp. Vakhtang Kipiani. — Kharkiv: Vivat, 2020. — 688 p.
- Vakulenko-K., Volodymyr. “Ia peretvoriuius…”: Schodennyk okupatsiyi. Vybrani virshi (available in English under the title “I’m Turning Into…”: Occupation Diary. Selected Poems). — Kharkiv: Vivat, 2023. — 192 p.
Bohdan Biliashivskyi, general director of the Bykivnia Graves National Historical Memorial on the air of Radio Ukraine.
We have fairly reliable information regarding the years 1937-1938. The regional NKVD alone executed approximately 19,000 people. Some of the documents concern cases that were heard by the Higher Moscow Troika and the visiting session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR in Moscow. The topic of military tribunals has yet to be researched.
As for 1939-1940, we have only an approximate idea. And 1941 is an entirely different story, as we lack sufficient information for this year. We have processed information on 20,000 victims of repression. Personal information about a further 30,000 individuals has not been fully verified. But even from these documents, it is clear that there will be tens of thousands more.
This article is a part of the special project ‘Erasure of a Word’ created in support of the exhibition ‘Antitext’. The project is implemented by the Chytomo media in cooperation with the Kharkiv Literary Museum.