It is literally impossible to count the exact number of victims of political repression in Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, tens of thousands of people were executed, hundreds of thousands were imprisoned, sent to concentration camps or maximum security penal colonies, and interned in psychiatric wards. During the Great Terror/Purge of 1937-1938 alone, 198,918 people were arrested in the Ukrainian SSR, about two-thirds of whom were executed. It is estimated that the number of victims in Ukraine reached a third of the total population. Thus, the Great Terror further “purged” Ukraine after forced collectivization and the 1932-33 Holodomor had already decimated most of the population.
The Great Terror/Purge was one of the worst and largest mass crimes carried out by the Stalinist regime against the population. In 1992, the discovery in the Soviet archives of the NKVD’s secret operational Order No.00447 of July 30, 1937, drastically changed the world’s perception of Stalin’s Great Terror.
“The lists were distributed to these special NKVD committees in each republic, region and district. People were classified into two categories: Category I-death by shooting, Category II-Gulag labour camp. Districts and regions reported that they were surpassing quotas… it became a real socialist competition (!). The special committees demanded an increase in quotas, especially for Category I, and requested “alternative plans”(!) People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR Izrail Leplevsky appealed three times to Moscow to increase the quotas for the elimination of “enemies of the people”. He was executed in January 1938, and his successor, People’s Commissar Aleksandr Uspensky also requested an increase in quotas. Moscow satisfied both requests…” notes Vasyl Ovsiyenko, former political prisoner, member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and well-known public figure and writer.In pursuance of Order No.00447 (commonly referred to as the “Kulak Operation”), “cleansing” operations continued in the Gulag concentration camps. In general, they lasted over 15 months and were officially terminated by a resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) on November 15, 1938. However, arrests and repressions continued… According to former dissident Vasyl Ovsiyenko, “it is impossible to count the number of victims of repression, deportation and famine in Ukraine”. The American historian and Holodomor researcher James Mace defined this period of Ukraine's history as post-genocidal, stating that “Stalin’s sociological scorched earth policy maimed Ukraine to such an extent that it created a discontinuity in the normal development of the Ukrainian people…”. As more and more information is unveiled, dozens of mass execution and mass burial places have been found during the past fifteen years (the “special shooting ranges” of Butovo near Moscow, Levachovo on the outskirsts of Leningrad, Bykivnia near Kyiv, Sandarmokh in Karelia, Vinnitsa in Ukraine, etc).
