Half an hour’s drive east of Kiev—from the gold-domed cliffs that survey the Eurasian expanses, across the Paton Bridge over the Dnieper, through the snarled streets of the new residential districts, the stucco on the apartment houses crumbling, the balconies cluttered with canned food and drying clothes, along the Avenue of the Sixtieth Anniversary of October toward the town of Brovary, where the road bends north to Byelorussia, past a traffic-control tower manned by militiamen with submachine guns, to a weedy shoulder almost opposite a garrison on a prerevolutionary artillery range—a sign the size of a folded map points into a pine forest. After missing the turn and doubling back, my companion, a young Red Army major, and I steer along a dirt track until we reach a second sign, which bans further traffic. It has been raining all morning. Now, as we get out of the car and walk a hundred yards past barrows overgrown with conifers and grass, the rain stops and we see the place: a cobbled path leading to a mound; a low retaining wall, at a right angle to the path, made of flat stones set on edge; and in the middle a flesh-red granite slab, the height of a man, with a chiseled inscription: “Eternal Memory.”
This is Bykivnia, and among these barrows schoolboys once played soccer with human skulls: tens of thousands of people, perhaps even a quarter of a million, were executed in the prisons of Kiev with a bullet through the temple or the medulla oblongata, brought here by the truckload, and cast into quicklimed pits. Four official commissions have investigated this annihilation in the last forty-five years. Yet the full story of who the victims are, who killed them, and how they came to be buried here has yet to be exhumed.
_____________
It was the spring of 1937, and the victories of one dictator were whetting the appetites of others. In Berlin, Adolf Hitler was casting a covetous eye toward the east and promising that it would swim in plenty under Nazi rule. In Madrid, Francisco Franco was calling in German bombers to level Guernica. In Rome, Benito Mussolini was ordering his troops to Abyssinia. And in Moscow, Joseph Stalin, who had already starved to death five, six, seven million Ukrainians—demographers would puzzle over the exact figure for decades to come—was pushing through a party resolution that would increase arrests tenfold and authorizing the NKVD, or secret police, to use “methods of physical pressure.”
In the hamlet of Bykivnia, trucks loaded with lumber were turning off the Kiev-Brovary highway and burrowing into the forest. Soon a green fence topped by barbed wire walled off ten acres. When the construction was finished, trucks continued to plod into the forest. Their loads concealed under canvas, they came in convoys, cars containing military men, the headlights turned off, before and after them. The gate swung shut when the convoy had entered; lights flared up behind the fence; and a commotion arose. Before dawn the trucks set off in the opposite direction, and then the forest was quiet again.
Half a dozen young men patroled the site with police dogs. Villagers were confounded by the odd clothes they wore when they ventured from the compound: a boot on one foot and a shoe on the other, or a dress, makeup, and a shawl. When one guard was asked where he worked, he replied that he was employed in a factory “the likes of which you won’t find anywhere in Europe.”
The famine of the early 1930’s had decimated the villages and towns. Now, in 1937, the city dwellers lived in fear, dreading the night when a Black Maria would pull up beside their building and take someone away. Families kept vigil at prison walls, importuned NKVD offices, and even begged Stalin himself to help them find their kin. The replies they received were formulaic: their relatives, they were told, had been sentenced to ten-year terms in labor camps “without the right to correspond.”
The phrase was a code for the death sentence. Most of those who had lost the right to correspond were killed even before they reached the coal mines and lumber camps of the Far North. In Kiev, the NKVD shot them in the basement of its headquarters or at the Lukianivka prison and buried them in the yards or in the city’s cemeteries. When these filled up, it carted the corpses to the forest. “If you don’t sign a confession,” interrogators threatened obstinate prisoners, “you’ll go down on Statute 23.” There was no Statute 23 in the criminal code. The tram running from Kiev to Bykivnia was No. 23.
The convoys continued to bring their loads here until September 1941, when the Germans took Kiev. A day before the victorious Wehrmacht arrived, the people of Bykivnia watched mounted guards with police dogs goad columns of exhausted prisoners behind the fence and then heard gunfire crackle. In one column they glimpsed a prominent woman writer, a famous singer who had refused to be evacuated to the east, and a distinguished Orientalist. In another they saw soldiers, uniforms stripped of insignia and belts. In a third they spotted children with expressions of merciful incomprehension on their faces.
The day after Kiev’s capture, villagers set out to search the enclosure. They found a four-room guardhouse stocked with food and alcohol. They saw that the trees had been cut down; rose willows were clambering over the sandy soil, and remnants of clothing were scattered about. When they delved two feet into the hillocks, their spades struck corpses and the sweet stench of death filled the air. The next day the village elder summoned a priest to conduct a service, and a German official ordered villagers to unearth the bodies in the presence of a photographer and witnesses.
In 1944, after the Red Army had retaken the region, a Soviet war-crimes commission concluded that the Nazis were responsible for the killings: a concentration camp where the Germans had executed 68,000 Soviet prisoners of war was located at Darnytsia, only three miles away.
_____________
After the war, when skulls began to protrude from the settling soil, grave robbers appeared. They riddled the ground with shafts, some six-feet deep, and supplied with improvised ladders, pulled victims from compressed piles of corpses with homemade hooks, and fingered the ears, mouths, and hands for earrings, gold teeth, and wedding bands. Bones lay scattered in the bushes. Bottles of vodka were stashed away. Once when a drunken ghoul killed a mate with a broken bottle, the authorities arrested him. Otherwise they left Bykivnia alone.
The thaw that swept the country after Nikita Khrushchev’s cautious revelation of Stalin’s atrocities in 1956 encouraged intellectuals to think that freedom—cultural, if not political—was finally at hand. In Kiev, the Writers Union set up a Creative Youth Club. Although the club would be disbanded in eighteen months, one dissident who knew the milieu wrote later that it produced “most of the leaders of the patriotic opposition in Kiev.” Rumors about the corpses in the pine forest had been reaching the club, and in 1962 three members—the poet Vasyl Symonenko, the artist Alla Horska, and the theater director Les Taniuk—determined to investigate them.
Goats were grazing and boys were playing soccer on a soggy field when the three arrived at Bykivnia. “Look what the boys are playing with,” Symonenko said when he came closer. He was pointing to a child’s skull with two bullet holes in it. Then he waved a hand at the goal posts: children’s skulls as well. Later, after Horska had gone off by herself to cry, he recited a quatrain that he had just composed:
We trample underfoot our enemies and friends.
O poor Yoricke, all in the same style!
In the graveyard of executed illusions
There is no room for graves
The poem is not very good—Symonenko was a journalist forced by censorship to versify his editorials—and in translation, bereft of rhyme and rhythm, it is even weaker, but the sentiment behind the poem led to a ban that still has not been lifted.
The club submitted a memorandum to the city authorities demanding that they put the graves in order and honor the dead with a monument. But Khrushchev’s reforms ran into the sands. Writers who had been told to speak up were ordered to shut up when their criticism began to look dangerous; Khrushchev himself was sent into retirement; and the reply to the young artists was ominous: their memorandum was a provocation; they were acting as hirelings of foreign intelligence services. Within a year Taniuk was driven from Kiev, and Symonenko, who had been repeatedly beaten by unidentified assailants, was dead. In 1970, Horska was found with a shattered skull—killed, her friends concluded, by the KGB.
The scavenging continued unhindered until 1971, when the government formed a second war-crimes commission. Guards kept the curious away while soldiers with masked faces collected bones in boxes. When the soldiers left, the villagers found a plywood sign which announced that a monument to the victims of fascism would be erected here. A newspaper reported that the remains of 3,500 Soviet citizens who were savagely tortured to death had been discovered near Bykivnia.
In time, skulls surfaced from the sand again, and the grave robbers returned. One man, envious rumor had it, earned 25,000 rubles in several days. Mykola Lysenko, a retired economist who visited his in-laws in Bykivnia in 1987, was moved by the sight of bullet-riddled remains mixed with rotting remnants of clothes to make the graves a personal cause. He photographed the bones, recorded the testimony of ten witnesses, and implored the poet Ivan Drach to go to Bykivnia. Drach was the right man to approach. His parents had barely survived the famine, and he had written a poem about the atrocities of the 1930’s in which he cursed history for first starving and then “feeding with silence the most silent people in the world.”
Drach and the two writers who accompanied him, Lysenko would relate, groaned with horror when they saw thousands of skulls glinting in the sunlight. The party, to which the writers took Lysenko’s evidence, responded more coolly: it formed yet another commission and appointed Major General Ivan Hladush, the Ukrainian republic’s Minister of Internal Affairs, to head it. Security forces cordoned the site again for six months, and soldiers dug up bones and tossed them into a pit, then covered it with loam, planted grass, and erected a monument.
“Eternal Memory” was inscribed on the stone. Below, in smaller letters, was written: “Here are buried 6,329 Soviet soldiers, partisans, members of the underground, and peaceful civilians killed by the fascist invaders in 1941-1943.” Local residents were not invited to the unveiling, which took place on May 9, the day the Soviet Union celebrates its victory over Nazi Germany. Instead, claqueurs were bused in from Kiev to watch a clutch of functionaries lay wreaths to the “Soviet patriots” buried here.
In July 1988, the people of Bykivnia assembled at the monument to denounce the commission’s findings. The villagers were angry. They knew that they had seen the green fence before the war. That they had heard the trucks and the gunfire. That they had tasted with their tongues the blood that had puddled in the road. But Hladush had instructed the Ukrainian press to be silent. Only when Kiev intellectuals threatened to protest and Sergei Kiselev, a reporter for a Moscow literary paper, managed to publish a brief item in November 1988 did the government set up a fourth commission. Hladush took charge once again, and a public prosecutor named Viktor Kulyk headed the investigating unit.
Hladush, whose ministry is a direct descendant of the NKVD of the 1930’s, was unwilling to overturn the previous commission’s findings. Since there was “no documentary evidence” and “not one witness” to the shootings, he told a Kiev newspaper, he saw no reason to doubt the earlier conclusion that the Germans had interred Soviet POW’s at Bykivnia.
_____________
Kulyk rejected that theory. The method of burial at the Darnytsia concentration camp—in contrast to Bykivnia—was marked by the pedantry and rationalism of the SS, he concluded. All the bodies had been undressed; gold teeth had been removed; and some of the corpses showed signs of infectious diseases and exhaustion, which would have been possible only after prolonged confinement in a concentration camp. Nor did Kulyk believe that both Nazi and Soviet victims had been reburied in the same graves. His investigators questioned more than 250 witnesses, all of whom agreed that the Germans did not execute or bury anyone at Bykivnia.
Petro Kukovenko, one of the villagers who had excavated a grave in 1941, got up the courage to speak only after the third commission blamed the Nazis for the killings. “The Germans didn’t shoot anyone or bring any corpses here,” he told the investigators. “We would have seen and heard them. After all, we knew about Babi Yar! The corpses were brought before the war.”
L.T. Husak worked as a signalman at the NKVD headquarters in Kiev. “From the window I saw trucks loaded to the top with corpses,” he said. “They were covered with canvas, I think, to conceal the cargo. To prevent blood from flowing through the cracks, the bottoms of the trucks were also lined with canvas.”
D. A. Makarenko drove a tram between Brovary and a suburb of Kiev in the late 1930’s. “When I came back from Brovary at two o’clock in the morning,” he recalled, “I often had to stop the tram to let NKVD columns go by. They consisted of three to six trucks draped with canvas with a car before and after them. They would turn off the highway into the forest. Everyone knew they were taking corpses behind the green fence.”
A ninety-one-year-old villager told the commission that the fence was solidly built, without a single crack. “You’d be grazing your cow and the guards wouldn’t let you come closer than twenty yards,” I. I. Korytsky said. “Those guards could always get cigarettes at our shop without waiting in line. ‘Why are you doing this?’ we asked the clerk. ‘They’re shooting people, and I don’t want them to do me in,’ he replied.”
Oleksander Kolosha was a teenage herder in 1941. “We often drove our herd to the edge of the Bykivnia forest,” he remembered. “Once 25 to 30 men dressed in civilian clothes and armed with shotguns intercepted us and began to shoot rock salt at us. They caught several of us and told us never to come near the forest. One day we saw fresh red stains on the road. We touched and tasted them. They were blood. At first we thought that meat had been taken from the meat-packing plant to Kiev, but then we concluded from the way the blood had splattered that the transport had come from Kiev. Some five herders, myself included, followed the trail of blood. We soon realized that it led to the green fence.”
A woman who lived near Bykivnia in the late 1930’s told the commission that her neighbor Mykhailo Riaboshtan had worked as a truck driver. “My brother was younger than he was, but they were friends,” Halyna Shamrai explained. “My brother said that he helped Riaboshtan wash away the blood on his truck at a pond. When my brother asked where the blood came from, Riaboshtan replied that he was driving corpses of enemies of the people to the vicinity of Bykivnia, where they were buried. They also washed the canvas with which the corpses were covered.”
Antonina D.—she is still so afraid of reprisal that she will not reveal her surname—was one of the villagers mustered to exhume the graves when the Germans came. “They gave us spades and ordered us to go to the green fence,” she recalled. “We were sure they would kill us. But when we got there the Germans made my father and me dig in two different places. We exhumed bodies. After a few pokes, I discovered the corpse of a young woman. She was pressing a child to her breast. Then the Germans told us to stop digging. They took a picture of us standing beside the bodies and left.”
The commission determined that the area behind the fence had belonged to the NKVD. And it found inscribed watchcases, cigarette holders, and other personal effects that allowed it to identify several victims arrested in 1937-38. One unusual piece of evidence was a bundle of metal badges with the inscription “KOU NKVD,” or “Kiev Regional Department of the NKVD.”
“I’m of two minds about these badges,” said Kulyk. “There’s a 90-percent probability that they came to be in the burials accidentally, but there’s a 10-percent probability that an NKVD employee deliberately used the badges as a signal to his distant descendants: when truth triumphs and you are investigating this crime, you must know what ‘firm’ was directly involved in it.”
_____________
In March 1989, the epitaph on the monument that referred to the fascists was quietly sanded away: the commission had announced that it had discovered the bodies of 6,783 people who had been executed between 1936 and 1941. The people of Bykivnia refuse to accept the findings. The barrows have been only partially exhumed, they say, and the real figure is far higher. Makarenko believes that if the trucks that he saw contained twenty corpses each and if there were four trucks 300 days a year for five years, 120,000 people may have been buried at Bykivnia. Lysenko offers an even higher estimate. By pacing off the graves—36,000 square yards—and figuring that three corpses fit into 2.4 square yards and that the corpses are buried in five layers, he calculates that Bykivnia contains the remains of 225,000 victims.
And there may be graves that none of the commissions has examined. Valentyn Matiiash, who grew up in Bykivnia, says that his mother told him before she died four years ago that as early as 1930 the corpses of peasants who had been executed for refusing to join collective farms had been brought here. Their small burial mounds, she said, were scattered throughout the forest.
The ancient Slavs commemorated their ancestors at Whitsuntide. Late spring, they believed, is the time of the year when the dead emerge from the rivers and lakes to take up residence in the forests and fields. On May 7, 1989, Les Taniuk, recently returned to Kiev after twenty years’ absence, led 12,000 people to a requiem at Bykivnia. The crowd was infuriated by reports that the government planned to cut down 3,000 acres of the forest to build a second train station for Kiev. Officials contended that the station would not affect the burial sites at Bykivnia or Darnytsia. Opponents replied that a dozen other sites were available. “Building a station on these bones,” Sergei Kiselev said at the requiem, “would be just as immoral as those cases when graveyards were leveled and stadiums were put up.”
Some of the mourners came to claim their dead. Motria Tovstenko, who lives on a nearby farmstead, could not hold back her tears. “My father is here,” she said, pointing at the raked hillocks. “His brother Anton is here, too. They were both taken away one night in October 1937.”
Tovstenko’s cousins Hryhorii and Yakiv, her uncle Anton’s sons, were also present. They had demanded an explanation about their father for fifty years, but learned only a year ago that he had been executed at Lukianivka in 1937. Although they were not told where he was buried, they knew that those who were shot at Lukianivka were brought here.
The late Andrei Sakharov sent a letter to be read at the requiem. It is important, he wrote, to know the whole truth not only about the victims who are buried at Bykivnia and in countless other places, but also about their killers. That is a guarantee that Stalinism will not return.
_____________
Countless other places. For Bykivnia is not unique, and reports of mass graves—in Dnepropetrovsk in southern Ukraine, Ivano-Frankivsk in the west, and Poltava and Vinnytsia in the east—have been cramming the Soviet press.
A plaque near Kirov Avenue in the center of the industrial city of Dnepropetrovsk announces that the Nazis executed Soviet citizens here in 1941-43. Semen Fisher, who was employed at a funeral home here in the 1930’s, says the sign is a lie. Kirov Avenue had not been built yet, and in its place stood a stone wall. Beginning in 1933, several trucks would pull up to the wall at night twice a week. “Once I plucked up my courage and crawled to the wall in the dark,” Fisher related. “What I saw was horrible. Dozens of corpses were being thrown into pits. The gravediggers from my funeral home were digging the pits and then filling them in.” Fisher realized then why the gravediggers were often drunk: “They were given vodka every time they went out to do their dirty work so that they wouldn’t complain.”
Mykhailo Zbarakh related that he came across skeletons when he was digging ditches for water pipes along the avenue in 1963. He had seen trucks drive up to a vacant lot at night before the war and reported the discovery to his superiors. A retired military officer soon arrived. “He pulled out an old map and showed us where to drive in stakes. The result was a square, 30 yards on each side. When an excavator removed the top layer of soil, we saw six trenches, each 25 yards long, filled with corpses. The clothing indicated that all these people had been killed in 1940 or 1941, when I had witnessed the mysterious nightly arrivals of the trucks. An order was given, and the excavator drove into the pit and, mangling and tearing the corpses, shoveled them into dump trucks. The corpses were brought to the site of this monument, where a pit had been dug, thrown in as if they were garbage, and covered with soil.”
Boris Pashkov was assigned an apartment in a building that was going up beside the monument in 1972. The tenants took turns helping the builders. “While they were digging the foundation pit,” said Pashkov, “the excavator kept turning up broken bones. Dump trucks took them off to a garbage heap. Later the future tenants began to dig a ditch beside the building. We almost dropped our spades. Bones, skulls, and even whole skeletons were scattered throughout the soil to a depth of several yards. The hands of the skeletons were tied behind their backs with decaying pieces of cloth or barbed wire. Every skull had two holes—one in the forehead and one in the nape of the neck.”
_____________
At a killing field that was discovered last September near the village of Pasichna, south of Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine, 526 bodies in three graves have been exhumed, and more graves are waiting to be opened. Skulls with bullet holes are being piled in coffins. Documents showing that many of the victims were prisoners of the NKVD have been found.
A local newspaper described the scene when the graves were opened: “A pile of wet, half-rotted clothing out of which human bones fall. The old villagers of Pasichna are crying. The eyes of those present are filled with horror and pain. A toothbrush. An aluminum container. [The victims] were obviously told that they would be transported. A leg bone sticks out of a shoe. Buttons. Death. The military field engineers are deathly quiet. And the excavator is digging a new trench. The shovel brings up clothing and bones.”
An interrogation record released by the authorities after mass graves were revealed in Poltava gives an account of how the NKVD conducted its executions. Pavlo Mazur had come from Poland in 1924, and though he took out Soviet citizenship and was a member of the party for ten years, he was arrested in August 1937 as a Polish spy. Four months later, he and nine other prisoners were summoned from their cells and driven to the NKVD headquarters, where they were placed in a basement cell. After two hours they were called out one by one. When it was Mazur’s turn, guards escorted him to a room where four men were waiting.
“One of the four asked my name and why I had not told the investigator the truth,” Mazur related later. “Then he ordered me to move away two steps and to get down on my knees, which I did, and fired a bullet into the back of my neck. I survived because the shot entered the left side of my neck. I lay beside other people who had been shot. We were loaded onto a truck and driven to a graveyard. I lay on the right side with two corpses on top of me. The pit was to the right of the truck, and to unload the corpses the right side was opened. When the corpses were being dumped I fell from the truck and rolled under it. Several minutes later I concluded that no one had noticed me and crawled to the rear axle of the truck, got up on it and held on to the spare tire.”
When the truck drove back to the NKVD headquarters and the driver blew his horn for the gate to be opened, Mazur slipped off the axle and wandered about the city. After knocking on a door and obtaining clothes (he had been stripped to his underwear) and a cloth to bandage his wound (he explained that he had been attacked by bandits), he sought shelter with his sister in Donetsk. He was betrayed by a neighbor. Having rearrested and interrogated him, the local NKVD carried out the sentence again. The second bullet did not miss.
In Vinnytsia, 125 miles southwest of Kiev, a green fence was also put up in 1937. In 1943, the occupying Germans learned that there were graves behind the fence. In 1941, certain that they would win the war, they had said little about Bykivnia. Two years later, facing defeat and worried that their own killings might be discovered, they were eager to propagandize Bolshevik atrocities and summoned an international commission to study the 91 mass graves the people of the town had found.
The commission’s 282-page report was illustrated with dozens of photographs, maps, and documents. Of the 9,435 victims, all of whom had been executed in the local NKVD prison in 1937-38, most of them with a bullet to the back of the neck, the report said, 169 were women. The majority of the men ranged in age from thirty to forty and had their hands tied behind their backs. Some had their feet bound as well. Of the female corpses, only a few elderly women were fully dressed; 49 were naked, and the rest were clad only in long shirts. This suggested that most of the women had been raped before being executed. Some of the victims had been gagged; still others had nooses around their necks. The shots had not all been fatal: 395 skulls had received severe blows. The earth in the throats and intestines of some of the victims suggested they had been buried alive, and one woman had given birth in the grave.
The Soviet government responded to the report precisely as it did when the graves of the Polish officers at Katyn were discovered: it blamed the atrocities on the Nazis and then lapsed into silence. In 1987, Vinnytsia residents started documenting the killings by collecting photographs, written evidence, and testimonies. But when the group tried to organize a commemorative meeting, city officials refused permission. Then in June 1989 Hryhorii Drobchak, a reporter for Silski visti, a popular agricultural newspaper, published a story. Several weeks later two other journalists brought forth evidence about the killings and asked the republic’s public prosecutor to undertake an investigation.
The eyewitness accounts that the reporters produced confirmed the German findings and revealed the procedure of killing. “My father often worked at the garage of the Vinnytsia NKVD,” a man named Lastovetsky recalled. “I helped him repair the cars and trucks. My father was allowed to work only until six o’clock in the evening, but as a boy I was allowed to stay until midnight or even later. When darkness came, gunshots rang out in the yard. No tractors were turned on to drown out the sound. People were simply forbidden to come close to the building. Trucks drove into the yard. They were filled with people, all of them kneeling in rows and facing the back. A heavy beam pressed the outer row against the others, so that no one could move, much less try to escape. The people were led out of the trucks, ordered to undress, and then taken into the car wash and shot.”
“Each time,” Lastovetsky continued, “seven or eight people were taken aside and not ordered to undress. They loaded the corpses onto the trucks, went with them for unloading, and then came back. They were given to understand that they had been spared and were ordered to go to their cells one by one, without a guard. They had to walk through a long corridor. A lamp hung from the ceiling in the middle, and a guard sat at a desk at the end. When a prisoner approached the lamp, the guard would order him to stop. To the right of this place was a boarded-up niche. An NKVD officer with a small-caliber rifle was standing there. He would shoot through a crack, right at the prisoner’s temple.”
Yurii Badzio, a historian and former political prisoner, calls this slaughter a war. “Stalinism destroyed our achievements of the 1920’s,” he says. “The intelligentsia was destroyed, our culture was trampled on, seven to ten million people fell victim to the famine of 1932-33, three million were deported and tortured. This was a war, a terrible war against our people.”
_____________
A war against the people. Wilted flowers, candle stubs, and a mud-soaked embroidered cloth are lying on top of the granite slab: mourners held a requiem here a few days ago. Streaks of rain water stain the stone on either side of the inscription. Inverted, they would look like a bull’s horns.
I set off along the track into the forest. What do I hope to find? Buttons? Bones? Signs of excavations? Traces of the graves that have not been identified yet? German soldiers demolished the guardhouse; villagers tore down the fence to patch their cottages and sheds; Soviet soldiers combed the barrows clean. The forest is mute except for a muffled roar from the distant highway.
Bykivnia. “Place of the bulls.” Cattle have been bred here since they were domesticated 4,000 years ago, and the cult of the bull that was celebrated from Spain to Crete, Sumeria, and India in the Stone Age had, its worshippers on the banks of the Dnieper as well: one of the chief deities of the pagan Slavs was Volos, “the hairy one,” god of cattle, fertility, and wealth.
An olive-green truck, the back covered with a tarpaulin, appears from behind the trees. I was warned when I was coming here to watch out for the militia. Did they see me drive off the highway and come to get me? I turn around and head for the car, trying to walk fast and yet look indifferent, hoping that my major will protect me. The truck lumbers up behind me; I step to the side of the path; the truck rumbles on.
The Greeks tell the story of the Minotaur, the bull-headed monster who was confined in the famous labyrinth on Crete. The Cretan ruler Minos had reduced Athens to the position of a tributary state, and every year the Athenians sent fourteen young men and women to be devoured by the Minotaur.
I pick up a piece of crushed white rock as a keepsake. After a week of rain the soft ground is bright with poisonous mushrooms. They grow so profusely here, the superstitious say, because they feed on the blood of the dead.
The Athenian hero Theseus, the story continues, offered himself as a sacrifice. Minos’s daughter Ariadne fell in love with him and revealed the secret that would allow him to escape death: a ball of thread that he was to fasten to the door and unwind as he went on.
A one-legged young woman swings by on crutches, a satchel with a loaf of bread and a head of cabbage in one hand, a girl of three or four clinging to the other. They do not answer—do not even look at me—when I say hello.
Theseus came upon the Minotaur asleep in the maze and killed him with his bare hands, then followed the thread back to the entrance and fled from Crete. Once the Minotaur was dead, the Athenians no longer had to pay tribute to Minos and with Theseus as their king established a just society.
_____________
A just society. This history of horrors is also the politics of the present: with the exception of the 1933 famine, no issue goes to the heart of relations between Moscow and Ukraine as deeply as the massacres of which Bykivnia has become an emblem. An open letter from five intellectuals, one of them Les Taniuk, that appeared in a Kiev newspaper last February suggests that the mass graves have become a point of national honor for Ukrainians. The mourners at the meeting at Bykivnia in May 1989 had passed a hat, the five wrote, and had collected 30 rubles—all in one and two-kopeck coins—so that Lazar Kaganovich could travel from his cozy apartment on the Frunze Embankment in Moscow to Bykivnia to testify about the killings there.
Why such generosity toward Kaganovich? The letter gave the answer: a trusted member of Stalin’s inner circle, he was one of the organizers of “an unprecedented genocide—the carefully planned murder of seven to nine million Ukrainian peasants during the famine of 1932-33”; ruthless in the face of anything that looked to him like Ukrainian nationalism, he was responsible for the death of a whole generation of intellectuals.
Kaganovich’s biographers support that verdict. He is a man, writes the historian Roy Medvedev, “on whose conscience there are quite as many crimes as there were on the consciences of those who were hanged in 1946 at Nuremberg.” Kaganovich, says Stuart Kahan, author of The Wolf of the Kremlin, “urged and orchestrated the deaths of 20 million people.”
And yet, why only Kaganovich?, I found myself asking when I had read the letter. “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Lord Acton said. But he went on to observe that “the greatest crime is homicide. The accomplice is no better than the assassin.” Yes, Kaganovich adorned execution orders with his signature (36,000 have been found), he had a hand in the killing of millions, but what about the men who scrubbed and fueled the trucks, fondled and fed the police dogs, sprinkled the quicklime, positioned the muzzles in the napes of the victims’ necks? Or the officials in the security services who have obstructed justice for so long?
And what about criminal prosecution? Four Bykivnia commissions in forty-odd years and no one has been charged. When reporters asked the fourth commission whether any of the people responsible for the killings were still working for the KGB, the answer was flat: no, they were not. Satisfied, none of the journalists asked whether retired officials would be indicted. Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost allows the crime to be named, but not the assassins or their accomplices. Is Kaganovich, who is now ninety-six years old and will probably never stand in the dock, being offered up as a scapegoat (his Jewish ancestry is no secret) so that younger malfeasants can live out their lives on easy pensions?
_____________
I walk back to the monument in the truck’s muddy ruts. The rain starts again as I take a last picture and get in the car. As we pass the armed militiamen on our way back to the city, I remark to the major that the inscription on the stone is fitting.
“Yes,” he says, then smiles wanly as if he knows something. “It allows everyone to fill in the missing words as he will.”
Speechless, I rummage in my bag for the solace of a bit of food. As we chew handfuls of raisins, I think about the people who traveled this road fifty years ago. And about the remark I have heard in Kiev: more than 100,000 unmarked mass graves are scattered across the Soviet Union; the entire country is built on bones.
I turn to the major. Haven’t you been fed with silence long enough?, I say. Aren’t you abdicating your right to hold your government accountable by not demanding that the killers be brought to justice?
Now it is his turn to be dumbstruck.
