Every year on the third Sunday of May Ukraine celebrates the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression. On this day, Ukraine recalls the numerous victims of Stalin's terror, which was massive in nature and especially struck precisely on Ukrainian lands, reports the Main with reference to Espresso.

Victims of mass repression were political and social activists, military, cultural figures. Terror referred to an unlimited number of families who were not involved in politics, were not interested in it and lived a normal human life.

Decrees of Kuchma and Yuschenko The day of remembrance of victims of political repressions did not immediately appear on the calendar of the memorable dates of independent Ukraine.

On October 31, 2000, by the decree of President Leonid Kuchma, the Holodomor Victims' Remembrance Day, which was celebrated every fourth Saturday of November, was renamed the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Holodomor and Political Repressions. However, it was subsequently decided that such a combination of two different memorable dates is inaccurate.

Therefore, on May 21, 2007, the decree of President Viktor Yushchenko commemorated the victims of the famines and political repressions in time. Also, this decision was due to the great attention that Yushchenko paid to the Holodomor topic. This attention required to separate thematically the memory of the Holodomor and the mass repressions that took place at the same time.

Therefore, the third Sunday in May was established as the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Repression. Traditionally, on this day, the top leadership of Ukraine lays flowers to the national memorial "Bykovnyansk graves" near Kiev. Bykovnia was one of the places of mass executions during Stalin's repressions.

The tragedy of Nikolai Skripnik When we recall the victims of Stalinist repression in the political environment, we are talking about the representatives of Ukrainian national communism. It was an interesting socio-political trend that tried to combine the struggle for the proletarian revolution with the attempts of the Ukrainian national revival. Historically, this idea was doomed to failure, which happened in the early 1930s.

One of the most prominent representatives and informal leaders of Ukrainian national-communists was Nikolai Skripnik. He served as People's Commissar of Education of Soviet Ukraine, but made statements that even went beyond educational issues. Skrypnik, in particular, raised the question of the annexation of the territories of Soviet Russia inhabited by Ukrainians to Ukraine.

Skripnik criticized Stalin's thesis of the inevitable aggravation of the class struggle, which was just the basis for mass repression. During the discussion of the draft law on land use, Skrypnik opposed the idea that the land should be considered the property of the entire Soviet Union. In his opinion, land should be the property of individual republics.

During the Holodomor, Skrypnik opposed the use of emergency measures against peasants. But then he was left without political support, and this accelerated the tragic denouement.

In early 1933, Stalin began a sharp curtailment of the policy of Ukrainization. Skripnik was dismissed and subjected to aggressive persecution. July 7, 1933 Skripnik shot himself, seeing the defeat of his attempts to combine the struggle for Ukraine with the desire to preserve it in the USSR.

Shooted revival: Stalin's war against Ukrainian artists Even before the defeat of the Ukrainian national communists, the Stalinist regime began to destroy representatives of the creative intelligentsia, who are now classed as "shot reborn".

In 1929-1930, 45 leading scientists and writers, in particular Sergei Efremov, Vladimir Chekhovsky, Joseph Germanse, Mikhail Slabchenko, were accused of belonging to the fictional special services of the national organization "Union of Liberation of Ukraine".

Using this litigation to create an atmosphere of suspicion, the Soviet government then turned to a broad offensive against the creative elite.

In the second stage of the repression, which began in 1934, 97 of the 193 members of the Writers' Union of Ukraine were persecuted. The main reason for the arrest were accusations of allegedly belonging to secret anti-Soviet organizations.

The culmination of these events was November 3, 1937, when, in honor of the 20th anniversary of the October Revolution, more than a hundred representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia were shot in the Solovki Special Purpose Camp.

Among them were Les Kurbas, Nikolai Kulish, Matvey Javorsky, Valeryan Pidmogilny, Pavel Filipovich, Valeryan Polishchuk, Grigory Epik, Mikhail Yalova and many others. It was then that the Ukrainian Renaissance was shot.

At the third stage of the Stalinist repression against the intelligentsia (1937-1938) 130 Ukrainian writers were shot, 11 - committed suicide, 119 were exiled to camps.

Bykovnyanskiye graves As we mentioned in the article, one of the symbols of the Stalinist repressions was the village of Bykovnya near Kiev.

This settlement in the 1930s secretly carried out mass graves of persons repressed by the NKVD. According to various sources, about 100,000 repressed people were buried in the Bykivnia Forest.

Exhumation of bodies in the Bykivnya burial site Today, according to archival documents identified and processed by the SBU, the names of more than 14,000 people.

Soviet authorities, all information about the burial in Bykovne was classified and conducted an investigation, the purpose of which was to prove that these crimes involved German invaders. Three state commissions of 1945, 1971, 1987 declared that victims of Hitler's terror were buried in Bykovna.

However, the socio-political situation changed and the fourth state commission recognized in July 1989 that victims of Stalin's repressions were buried in Bykovna.

April 30, 1994, the opening of Bykovnyansky memorial complex. On May 22, 2001, the government approved a resolution "On the establishment of the state historical and memorial reserve" Bykovnyansk graves ".

Killed generations Ukrainian historian Stanislav Kulchitsky estimates the demographic loss of Ukraine in the first half of the twentieth century in about 15 million people. We are talking about people who died or were forcibly deported outside their homeland.

For the population of Ukraine, which, within the present borders, did not exceed 40 million by 1914, losses of this magnitude are catastrophic.

In 1959, the all-Union population census showed that in Ukraine there were 41.9 million citizens, that is, only then was the level of population that existed before the First World. So, the restoration of the population took 45 years.

According to the 1989 census, Ukraine's population reached 51.7 million.

The increase was 10 million people in 30 years, although the birth rate was halved compared to the pre-war.

It should be noted that when a person dies at a young age, then his children and grandchildren are not born. Therefore, direct and indirect demographic losses of Ukraine from Stalin's terror and wars in that period can reach 45 million. According to experts, in conditions of normal demographic development, Ukrainians could become a hundred million people.