“If they sleep on me, it’s like war,.

Without hesitation, I’ll tell you the names.”.

Maxim Krivtsov.

. Not only those whom Russia is killing today, but also those whom it destroyed a century ago.

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Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine almost daily collects its bloody toll, wiping out cities and villages, killing our people - military and civilians, adults and children, the number of whose names can no longer fit either in the head or on a news portal. These names are a constant and burning pain that lives in the hearts of not only relatives, but also those who did not know the victims personally. For example, a young girl, artist Veronika Koshuzhko, killed during the shelling of Kharkov in 2024, or a caring grandmother, pensioner Maria Primak, who died after a missile attack on the capital in 2025.

Thanks to the media, someone’s stories become known all over the world, such as the story of Irina Filkina, “the woman with a red manicure,” killed by Pskov paratroopers in Bucha in 2022. Her fate has already become an international symbol and one of the proofs of Russian war crimes. And someone’s stories are still unknown to the public, since they are associated with the most recent losses. On May 14, 2026, Russia again carried out one of the most massive and severe attacks on Ukraine, taking the lives of over 20 people in Kyiv alone, including three children.. Their names have not yet been made public, but this does not make the pain any less....

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Just as the anger that keeps us in a state of mental and physical mobilization - after all, we must endure and win - and the fiery desire for fair retribution for those who brought death to our land are not becoming less..

The punishment of Russian criminals must necessarily be accomplished in our lifetime, otherwise humanity should forget about basic values \u200b\u200band its own safety and admit that it is not able to protect itself from cynical and immoral monsters. If there is no real trial with specific terms of imprisonment and compensation for damages, then generation gaps, other problems and troubles and all sorts of conditional Tucker Carlsons or Vladimir Solovyovs, bought with FSB funds, will try to blur the concept of responsibility, the understanding of good and evil. And then the world will have to prepare for the next war and its victims. After all, the current situation in Europe has clearly shown that unpunished evil returns, and returns in an even uglier and more aggressive form.. At one time, in order to defeat the Nazi regime, many influential countries made an agreement with the devil - the communist system, turning a blind eye to its crimes against its own citizens. Putin’s Russia, having chosen the “familiar” path of a personality cult like Stalin’s, a policy of internal isolationism and external expansion, the search for enemies and the idea of \u200b\u200bone’s own superiority, ultimately reviving and apologizing the KGB past, inevitably came to Russianism as an ideology, way of thinking and action.

The fascist Russian worldview, which is based on Soviet traditions and is aimed at waging aggressive war and justifying violence, must be firmly and persistently opposed. Thanks to the army, Ukraine is providing armed resistance, using all its capabilities and the support of neighboring countries. However, the cultural and intellectual struggle is also important - against imperial myths, stereotypes, distortions of the real picture of the Soviet past, on which the propaganda of aggressive and cannibalistic Russia is based.

One of these myths was the image of the USSR, fostered through cinema and pop art in general, as a country of “delicious ice cream”, low prices and care for its citizens.. This myth in Russian memory politics is always associated with the denial of the events of the Great Terror of 1937–1938 and other punitive operations or their explanation by the needs of the political moment or economic expediency. Mass murders of civilians in peacetime are cynically ignored, archival criminal cases of those repressed are classified and access to them is denied.

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In Ukraine, at the same time, the documents of the Soviet punitive authorities are open to a wide audience, and the annual holding, according to the decree of the President of Ukraine since 2007, of the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression on the third Sunday of May (this year - May 17) indicates that society is ready for an adequate perception of the traumatic past and a sincere conversation about the difficult processes and dire consequences of the Russian-Bolshevik occupation. After all, in fact, history can teach. Especially if you want to learn and understand cause-and-effect relationships. See the impact of certain decisions on the fate of an entire people. Realize that in an unstable world, only your own independent legal state will protect against the repetition of genocidal practices.

It is very important that, despite the huge number of victims of repression (and according to the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, during the Great Terror on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR, 198,918 people were sentenced, about two-thirds of whom were sentenced to death), Ukrainian citizens notice more global things. After all, we are talking, on the one hand, about depriving the community of a certain alternative to development. Having destroyed writers and artists, actors and professors, students and engineers and, finally, simply masters of their craft, regardless of profession, Red Moscow liquidated entire scientific and art schools, decapitated industrial, educational and museum institutions and thus weakened intellectual capital.

On the other hand, massive political repressions slowed down the natural process of transferring experience from one generation to another. After all, those who could talk about rank and struggle, culture and ancestral traditions, the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921 and state-forming dreams ended up in the pits of Bykovnya, Sandarmokh, Vinnitsa, Rutchenkovo \u200b\u200bPole, etc..

Well, actually, on the third hand, behind a large number of victims it is always necessary to see individual stories, realizing that each person destroyed by the communist regime created his own separate world, dreamed about something, strived for something, he thought, felt, made plans for the future. It is such individual stories that surprisingly transparently demonstrate the banality and everyday life of evil, when murders in the USSR turned into a bureaucratic routine, a lack of critical thinking, and the fulfillment of planned indicators. We remember that specific plans were made for each Ukrainian region at that time (i.e.. limits) for execution, which had to be reported regularly. Executing criminal orders, NKVD officers did not notice and did not want to notice a living person of flesh and blood, frightened, beaten, humiliated, but perceived him as a number in a line of statistical reporting.

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Total depersonalization is another crime of the totalitarian system, which can only be compensated by naming the names of the victims, telling personal stories, showing by their example how the totalitarian machine of destruction works - uses the smallest biographical facts, everyday circumstances, family stories to justify illegal murder.

Imagine a young author who, having made his debut only in the early 1930s, is seriously worried that his word will not be empty, unnecessary, mediocre. In a letter to his wife, Mikhail Dubovik wrote: “I would like to say this so that someone’s heart can feel the rage of passion, fire, anger, joy, money, love... Sometimes you bite your lips and tears roll out of your eyes. This is the torment of creativity. This is the torment that my heart says and gives birth to from the power: “for now”? for what?

Having poor health and just embarking on a literary path, he earned his living by changing different professions: proofreader, instructor of rural reporters, secretary, published in the then press. But despite such an outwardly standard path of the “proletarian writer”, he retained Ukrainianness in everyday life and speech. At least, his son, the famous artist of the sixties Alexander Dubovik, recalled: “At home they only taught us Ukrainian, at the kindergarten, and then they sent me to a Ukrainian school.”. When, at the hour of evacuation, I found myself in Chelyabinsk, I had a problem: I don’t understand the Russian one, and they didn’t understand me!

Mikhail Dubovik was arrested in June 1941, accused of anti-Soviet activities and participation in the “nationalist” organization “Prosvita” (NB! Mikhail Dubovik was shot on July 7, 1941 in Kyiv; in 1954, the writer was rehabilitated. But the family was persistently lied to about the true circumstances of the death for decades.. The son learned the truth about his father’s fate only in 1991.

Now imagine a girl from Fastovshchina named Anna, who has been raised in a traditional role model since childhood. Listens to parents, follows customs, sings in the church choir, goes to the local church, gets married. At the age of 20 she gives birth to a son, then a daughter, and peacefully rules the earth with her husband.. In October 1937, Anna Lyasota was arrested by NKVD officers “for a hostile attitude towards Soviet power, counter-revolutionary agitation” and “written communication with relatives in Poland”. This is how a woman’s private correspondence, which was confirmed by some fellow villagers, along with criticism of the authorities’ predatory attitude towards collective farmers and teaching children their native language, cost a resident of the village of Snegirevka her life. And it didn’t matter that the “investigation” lasted only 15 days, and the case itself was based only on words. Anna Lyasota was shot on November 10, 1937 in Kyiv, and rehabilitated on June 1, 1989.

But during communist rule, it was not only creative activity or criticism of living standards that could become grounds for arrest.. The totalitarian system is designed in such a way that even silence is regarded as suspicious. Elena Kramska, a teacher at the Trilesk school in the Kiev region, attracted attention with her behavior because “she was very careful when talking with teachers, especially on political topics” (this is a direct quote from her description from her place of work), and she also received parcels from relatives abroad (lard, coats, scarves, children’s literature). But what stuck most in the woman’s case was the usual bureaucratic document about the surrender of five silver spoons and one gold cross to the financial department of the NKVD, since they were not related to the case and could not be material evidence. Of course, why does the arrested woman’s son, a 15-year-old boy whose mother and father will soon be shot, need precious things?. The Soviet government must “take care” of him....

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The names that we remember to honor the memory of the victims of political repression are not only the announced physical losses of the Ukrainian population due to the crimes of the communist regime. And not only confirmation that all these horrors happened on our land during the occupation. This is also our symbolic account to Russia, regardless of what color the flag is currently flying over the Kremlin. After all, orders and figures came from Moscow, operations were authorized by the highest party and state leadership of the USSR, and the killings of people were not “the excesses of the performer,” but a systemic and systematic policy of the authorities. And this symbolic account with the names of hundreds of thousands of those tortured must be added to other names that we will remember during the future trial of racism and communism.