After the Second World War the number of war victims was estimated at 7.5 million. In the 1950s Nikita Khrushchev amended this figure to 20 million, and during Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule this number grew to 27 million Soviet citizens. These figures attest to the fact that the Soviet government tried by all possible means to conceal the truth, for all the “victories” were primarily at the cost of millions of people who perished during the war.

The exhibits in this group of panels recount events in Western Ukraine, when the Bolshevik regime was conducting a war of total annihilation against the UPA–”a war after the war.” This section of the exposition reveals for the first time the complexity of the situation in the postwar years. According to Soviet propaganda, the “Banderites, who were violent killers,” were to blame for the hostilities. A photograph of one of those special groups that were operating in Ukraine in 1944 pictures a NKGB group headed by a Lieutenant–Colonel Zakharov, whose soldiers were dressed as Ukrainian insurgents of the UPA. These groups of bogus insurgents were trained Chekists, who had mastered the local dialect and were familiar with Western Ukrainian traditions. Former insurgents were also recruited under the threat of death to these special groups, whose members were taught in special Chekist training schools, from which they were sent forth to run amok in Western Ukraine in the guise of UPA soldiers. In June 1945, 156 of these special Soviet groups, totalling 1,783 individuals, were operating in the western oblasts, disguised as UPA fighters.

In the later years of the struggle against the Ukrainian national–liberation movement, the number of special groups and their personnel significantly increased. In addition, seventeen divisions of regular Soviet troops were sent to the Western Ukrainian oblasts to fight against the liberation movement. According to archival sources, from the time of the so–called “liberation” of the Western Ukrainian oblasts until June 1945, 86,749 people were sent there on permanent duty. These same archival sources record that during this period Soviet forces captured 93,610 bandits, although in 1944 the ranks of the UPAwere officially estimated at 45,000–80,000 men (up to 60,000, according to German sources). These discrepancies lead to the conclusion that the Soviet regime was conducting a struggle against the entire population of Ukraine’s western oblasts. Thus, it is imperative to reconsider each of these Soviet crimes and understand who actually committed them.

In the years 1944–1954, half a million people were repressed in Western Ukraine, of which 230,000 were executed.

The Soviet Union’s renewed struggle against Ukrainian nationalism is character. istic of the postwar situation in Ukraine. This campaign was sparked by official criticism of the filmmaker Oleksandr Dovzhenko, whose script for the film “Ukraine in Flames” was discussed at a special meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All–Union Communist Party (b) during the war. The pretext for criticizing Dovzhenko was simply Stalin’s comment that his film script featured only Ukrainians, to which Dovzhenko replied that he too was a Ukrainian. Stalin judged this to be a manifestation of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism.”

The Kremlin rulers were extremely alarmed by the intractable and heroic struggle of the UPA, which was well organized and supported by almost the entire population of the western lands, and setting an example for all of Ukraine.

Panel 35 presents the organizational activity of the Ukrainian underground. Among the exhibits is a document entitled “The Platform of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council”, the president of which was Kyrylo Osmak. Other items include agitation posters of the Ukrainian underground and examples of clandestine periodicals. The lower part of the stand displays a report of an UPA unit from April 1949 describing the features of the territory on which the Ukrainian unit is conducting its struggle, and the provocative actions and abuse that the Muscovite occupying regime was wreaking on the civilian population.

Panel 36 also displays photographs of two renowned Ukrainian poets–Maksym Rylsky and Volodymyr Sosiura–and information on the campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans,” which was essentially a campaign directed against everyone who was working in the sphere of Jewish history and culture and against Jewish writers in Ukraine. This onslaught is embodied in the photograph of Illia Spivak, a researcher who died in prison during the campaign to root out “cosmopolitans.”

Stalin’s death concludes this terrible period. There would undoubtedly have been more repressions had the tyrant’s death not altered the situation. The exposition also includes a photograph, never officially published until now, of an ailing Stalin. The process of shedding light on this appalling postwar period would not be complete without documents attesting to the heroic armed struggle of the Ukrainian underground, which lasted until 1956. The upper part of panel 37displays agitation leaflets of the Ukrainian underground. These materials, which were published in a clandestine printing house located in Vinnytsia, demonstrate how analysts in the nationalist underground exposed Moscow’s lies and its plans to devastate Ukraine.

The story of these documents is fascinating. In the spring of 1991, when earthwork was being carried out near the village of Voroniv in Rohatyn county, Ivano–Frankivsk oblast (the site of General Shukhevych’s clandestine headquarters until 1949), the excavator shovel brought up a barrel, the lid of which was sealed with wax. The interior was packed with documents rolled up inside old newspapers. The cache of papers, dated until 1949, turned out to be the archive of General Shukhevych’s headquarters. After the oblast branch of the Memorial Society obtained these priceless materials, someone broke into the society’s offices one night.

The assailants turned the contents of the rooms inside out, tossed around documents, and failing to find what they were looking for, used a hammer to smash the society’s most expensive possession–a colour television.

Afterwards, suspicious individuals began paying increasingly frequent visits to the head of the society, Roman Krutsyk, always leading the lengthy discussions around to the mysterious archive. These people purported to be visitors from various countries–either representatives of the Ukrainian diaspora or former members of the OUN or the UPA. Some even whispered confidentially that they were members of the Central Leadership of the OUN, and demanded that the archive be hand. ed over to them. But fully aware of the Soviet secret services’ cunning and capacity for instigating provocations, the leaders of the Memorial Society did not reveal any information about the archive to these suspicious visitors.

For more than a year the archive was kept in the basement of a farmer living in a Western Ukrainian village. After the proclamation of Ukraine’s independence a small portion of the archive was legally registered in the funds of the Museum of Liberation Struggles of the Sub–Carpathian Land. The rest of the documents are being studied, and in time they will reveal to the world many secrets about the crimes of the Communist system and the truth of the heroic struggle of the Ukrainian insurgents. Copies of several documents from this archive are represented in the panels.