A Ukrainian government commission has concluded that thousands of people buried in a mass grave outside Kiev were killed during Stalin's purges, not by Nazi soldiers.
Halyna Pastushuk reports from Kyiv,
12.08.06
The commission's conclusion supports the testimony of elderly witnesses in the nearby village of Bykovnia, who said they saw trucks dripping blood en route to the site in the 1930's, before the Nazis occupied the area. Unofficial estimates put the number of bodies in the grave at 200,000 to 300,000. Villagers in Bykovnia broke five decades of silence to accuse Stalin's secret police after the Ukrainian government erected a monument in May 1988 blaming Nazi occupiers for the crime. The villagers in December forced Ukrainian authorities to establish the commission, saying three previous investigations had covered up the truth by blaming Nazi troops. Dr. SBawomir Kalbarczyk, Chief Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, said during the international scientific conference “Archeology and Terror” conference that took place in Tallin in Novembre 2005: It is worth mentioning that the Bykovnia pits did not say their „last world” and may provide still a lot of valuable information, since the Ukrainian authorities plan to carry out further exhumations there. They were to be conducted in August last year, however were postponed til this year. The National Remembrance Institute’s prosecutors have been invited in the capacity of observers. There were found in Bykovnia numerous objects, belonging undoubtedly to the Polish citizens, among others, the uniforms, military caps, “knee-boots”, Polish coins (including their issue of 1939), and also the objects manufactured in Poland or in the Western Europe. Unfortunately, all those things were separated from the corpses, so they could not be attributed to any concrete persons. One thing is however of a crucial value – it is a driving license belonging to the person who appears on a partial list of the executed civilians, drawn up by the NKVD (those who were murdered in Ukraine).
Besides, the Ukrainian soil conceals more secrets. In 1997, the Ukrainian authorities carried out exhumations in the neighborhood of the former NKVD prison in Vladimir in Volhynien in order to check information disclosed by the local population on burial of Stalin’s regime victims at that place. From death-pits there were excavated the remains of 100 persons, whose skulls had bullet holes in their rear part. With the corpses there were many items of the Polish origin: shoulder boards of the Polish military men and policemen, uniform buttons with the image of the White Eagle, etc. Just recently, the Institute of National Remembrance has been informed that one of the investigations, conducted by the Military Prosecutor’s Office in Ukraine brought to discovery in Kiev of the remains of 270 unidentified Polish officers. In cooperation with the Ukrainian party Poles will do their very best to explain this gloomy atrocity which, supposedly, may have a certain link with the Katyn Crime. Such assumptions are justified as a trace of the prisoners murdered in Ukraine breaks off, among others, in the Kiev prison.