The opening of the archives of the Soviet secret services: the terrible stories of victims of the regime

The opening of the archives of the Soviet secret services: the terrible stories of victims of the regime.
Photo: findingshakespeare.co.uk

Yana Aliyeva, a 34-year-old marketer from Kiev, first saw the face of her great-grandfather Vasily Khoroshko in a criminal case of the Soviet era.

Now, when the Security Service of Ukraine has opened access to many documents of the NKVD and the KGB, it has its own photo on the smartphone on her great-grandfather, writes Kyiv Post.

The original snapshot of a tired 50-year-old man with a traditional Ukrainian mustache and in a padded jacket was taken during the interrogation in the NKVD of the USSR back in 1929 year.

In the same year, Khoroshko, a resident of the city of Lokhvitsa, Poltava region, was found guilty of anti-Soviet activities for belonging to the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, which declared independence from the Moscow Patriarchate.

He was sent to a prison camp in Kazakhstan for 5 years, but never returned.

Aliyeva was surprised to read in the criminal case that her great-grandfather was a rich Cossack from the Don region in Ukraine and in the Kuban in Russia.

Another surprise for her was the collective letter signed by 346 by the residents of Lokhvitsa, which they sent to the NKVD, in defense of Khoroshko and three other people arrested along with him, which called for their release.

“We used to think that these were times of betrayal and denunciations, but you see how many people came to their defense,” Aliyeva said.

In the reading room of the SBU archive, Aliyev spent many hours reading and copying the thick files of a criminal case of almost a century ago.

Thanks to a law passed by 21 in May 2015, Ukraine has opened all its KGB archives, with the exception of documents that still contain state secrets.

Thousands of people began combing through the once top-secret files.

Igor Kulik, an official at the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, the government agency responsible for decommunization, said that about 50% of those visiting the archive are relatives of people who suffered from Soviet repression, while the rest are historians from around the world .

“Often a person does not remember his father or grandfather, but wants to see his handwriting, his signature, his photograph from prison. It’s like touching a loved one for the first time in 50 years,” Kulik explained.

In the reading room, Evgenia Lebed photographed the criminal case against Stanislav Bon, a 31-year-old military paramedic who was shot in 1937 in Dnepropetrovsk for his alleged membership in a Trotskyist organization, after many soldiers of the garrison suffered from compote poisoning.

Bon was the brother of Eugene Lebed’s grandmother, and now an 99-year-old woman who for many decades believed that he was missing during World War II, wants to find at least some information about his fate.

Lebed said her grandmother did not want to believe that her brother was an "enemy of the people." Lebed tried to explain to her that the case was fabricated, and one of the likely reasons was Bon’s Polish origin.

In 1960, he was rehabilitated after his wife filed a request for a review of his case.

Tatyana Silka, an insurance agent, is very sorry that her mother and grandmother died before she got access to the criminal case against her great-grandfather Alexei Stepanenko.

For decades, the family lived in shame that their relative was enemy of the state - Stepanenko was executed on charges of nationalist and counter-revolutionary activities against the Soviet Union.

He was the head of the village council of the village of Tarasivka in the Poltava region, when in September 1937, he was arrested along with 20 by other villagers.

Silk discovered that initially all the defendants denied their guilt. But literally a month later, almost all of them, including her relative, began to testify against themselves, most likely under pressure. Soon after, they were all executed.

In 1959, another investigator discovered that there was no evidence against any of the executed 21, and canceled the case.

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