Archeologists unearthing bones and skulls from Bukynya cemetery where the bodies of tens of thousands of political prisoners were buried in the 1930s and 1040s
BUKYVNYA – For decades the truth about the tens of thousands of political prisoners buried in Bukyvnya forest was covered up,
On October 15 archeologists began excavating the site five kilometers east of Kyiv to remove the remains of the men and women who were executed by the Soviet secret police and buried there more than 60 years ago.
Teams from Ukraine, Poland and Russia plan to work at the location until Nov. 3. They expect to complete their investigation next summer, and then a monument will be erected at the site.
Authorities say the 4.5-hectare plot was used by the NKVD, the KGB’s precursor, to bury the bodies of between 20,000 and 100,000 political prisoners from 1937 to 1941. It is believed to be one of the largest mass graves in Ukraine, second only to Babyn Yar, where up to 200,000 bodies are said to be buried.
On Oct. 23, as workers gingerly removed skulls, bones and personal items from three pits, Russian investigator Yury Dmitryiv sorted through shoes that had been piled up in a mound near one of the 3-meter-deep holes.
Dmitryiv, a small man with a graying mustache, has been investigating mass graves in the former Soviet Union for 11 years. From the stamp on the soles of the shoes he discovered that most were made in the 1930s at the Russian Red Triangle factory. The presence of rubber boots indicates that the victims were most likely killed in late autumn.
Using KGB documents, Dmitryiv was able to narrow down the date of the deaths to autumn 1937 or 1938. A close look at the bones revealed that most of the 34 victims were under 30 and that three were probably women.
Dmitryiv picked up a sturdy dress shoe.
“This is an expensive shoe,” he said. “It probably belonged to a rich man.”
Shedding light on murder
Officials have known about the Bukyvnya site since the 1940s, but it wasn’t until 1988 that the Soviet government acknowledged to the public that most of the victims died at the hands of the authorities.
Nazi occupiers were the first to dig up some of the bones in 1942. They said remains belonged to victims of Stalin’s regime. The Soviet government conducted excavation in 1944 and concluded that the remains belonged to victims killed by the Germans earlier in the war. In 1971 Soviet authorities dug again, and again the government told the public that the victims were killed by Germans.
It wasn’t until 1988 that the truth came out: The Soviet government admitted that
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Bukyvnya had been a burial ground used by the NKVD.
Up until 1989 the remains of 6,000 people had been exhumed from the site and reburied. That year a monument was erected and for more than a decade nothing more was done.
The current excavation came about after the Cabinet of Ministers issued a recommendation in December 2000 asking regional authorities to investigate mass graves in their areas. Last May parliament designated the Bukyvna cemetery as a national historical site. The law paved the way for Dmitryiv and about three dozen others to begin excavation last month.
But research into the killings at Bukyvnya has been going on for years. According to Mykola Rozhenko, author of the 1999 book “Pine Trees of Bukyvnya Bear Witness,” the events at Bukyvya marked the beginning of mass murder of political prisoners in Ukraine. Before 1937, Rozhenko said, political prisoners were killed in small numbers and their bodies were buried in ordinary cemeteries.
But in 1937, authorities stepped up their reign of terror. More than 100 people a day were being killed in Kyiv, and Bukyvnya became a mass graveyard for prisoners from the Kyiv, Cherkasy and Zhytomyr regions.
“There were Bukyvnyas in almost every region,” Rozhenko said.
Rozhenko estimates that there are between 50,000 and 70,000 Ukrainians, Poles and Jews buried in Bukyvnya.
While Jewish organizations have drawn attention to the massacre at Babyn Yar, the tragedy at Bukyvnya is less well known. Rozhenko blames Ukraine’s leaders, who, he says, are living in the past. It was, in part, pressure from the Polish government that initiated the exhumation at Bukyvnya.
Identifying the dead
Several miles outside Kyiv, a bumpy road trails off into the forest where metal crosses stand and tattered ribbons are attached to trees in an eerie memorial. On one tree was a small plaque with a name and two dates: birth and death.
Dmitryiv has seen more than 100 such sites, all bearing the characteristics of a Stalinist massacre: pits filled with skulls and bones and topped off with a meter of soil.
Dmitryiv is seldom able to identify victims unearthed from mass gravesites.
Occasionally, though, he finds a clue. On several occasions he has discovered slips of paper in shoes. They are often receipts given to prisoners when they enter confinement, and they allow Dmitryiv to determine the group of prisoners.
Once he was able to tell a 60-year-old women, whose father was taken away before she was born, where he was buried.
“It’s not true that the dead don’t talk,” said Dmitryiv. “They do.”
