No part of this publication may be copied or reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. Authors of this work: Igor Bigun, Sergii Butko, Volodymyr Viatrovych, Kyrylo Halushko, Serhii Horobets, Sergii Gromenko, Oleksandr Zinchenko, Olesia Isaiuk, Bogdan Koro- lenko, Maksym Maiorov, Vasyl Pavlov, Rostyslav Pyliavets, Yana Prymachenko, Sergii Riabenko, Viktoria Iaremenko. Under the editorship of: Oleksandr Zinchenko, Volodymyr Viatrovych, Maksym Maiorov Ukrainian Institute of National Memory www.memory.gov.ua “LikBez. Historical Front” Center for Research on the Liberation Movement Liberation Movement Electronic Archive The cover image uses the “Remembrance Poppy” symbol created by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory and the National Television Company of Ukraine. Symbol’s Creator: Serhij Mishakin Translation: Larysa Zariczniak, Oleg Prots Photograph’s Taken From: Branch State Archives of the Security Service of Ukraine, Central State CinePhotoPhono Archives of Ukraine named after H. Pshenychnyi, Centre for Research on the Liberation Movement Archives, German Federal Archives (bundesarchiv.de), “Istorychna Pravda” (istpravda.com.ua), Centre for Research on the Liberation Movement Electronic Archive (avr.org.ua), Wikipedia Commons (www.commons.wikimedia.org), “LikBez. Historical Front” (likbez.org.ua), waralbum.ru © Igor Bigun, Sergii Butko, Volodymyr Viatrovych, Kyrylo Halushko, Serhii Horobets, Sergii Gromenko, Oleksandr Zinchenko, Olesia Isaiuk, Bogdan Korolenko, Maksym Maiorov, Vasyl Pavlov, Rostyslav Pyliavets, Yana Prymachenko, Sergii Riabenko, Viktoria Iaremenko, Text, 2017. © Oleksandr Zinchenko, Volodymyr Viatrovych, Maksym Maiorov, Arrangement, 2017. The War Myths How are myths created? And more importantly, why are myths created? And what can be done with these myths? Is it even necessary to do something? If you are holding this book in your hands than it means you also want an answer to some of these questions. This means we know the answer to the last question: it is important to talk about historical myths. Because they are interesting and concern the question: what is our actual history? The answer to the rest of these questions is not as short. How are myths formed? It is simpler to explain using any one example. It so happens that I have such a story at hand. I, at one point, even wrote a book about it. We are talking about Katyn. Already, at the beginning of the 1990s, in my native Kharkiv, the study of one of the mass graves of Polish prisoners of war, which became known as the Katyn crime, began. All the graves were damaged by huge building drills. Human remains were milled and mixed with the ground, as if by a huge meat grinder. These traces – 60–80 cm in diameter –clearly come up as bright circles in aerial geometry studies. No one at that time could explain why the NKVD secret cemetery needed building drills for their graves. In brief: The Katyn crime – the mass executions of Polish prisoners of war in Katyn, Kharkiv, Kalinin and several other places in the spring of 1940 – is today one of the most thoroughly investigated crimes of the communist regime. But even after half a century, this topic was still taboo in the Soviet Union. Only the official version of Katyn could be remembered: the Poles were killed not by communists but by the Nazis and not in the spring of 1940 but in 1941. It was in the spring of 1943, that the whole world first heard of this small village near Smolensk. German radio announced the discovery in the Katyn forest of thousands of Polish prisoners of war that the communists had executed. 4 The War and Myth. Unknown WWII The Germans knew that the Polish government in London and the families in the occupied Third Reich were searching for at least 10 thousand missing compatriots. Berlin fully understood the consequences of their message. The partnership of the USSR and the Polish government in exile under General Władysław Sikorski was under strain after the Soviet aggression against Poland on 17 September 1939. In fact, if it were not for the additional efforts of the British Prime Minister it is not known if there would have been any partner- ship. The relations between Britain and the Soviet Union were not simple, even as allies in the anti-Hitler coalition. This was perfectly understood in Berlin. The Katyn news pursued a very cynical purpose: to drive a wedge between the Allies and provoke a conflict which would lead to the collapse or weakening of the anti-Hitler coalition. It almost succeeded: despite the harassment by the British government, the Polish government refused to recognize the Soviet version of the Katyn trag- edy. The USSR, a few days after the German message, announced that the Polish prisoners of war were shot by the Nazis during their attack on Smolensk in 1941, and after a week broke all relations with the Sikorsky government. More on this can be read in Myth 8. Here, it is important to note one important thing: from April 1943, the story of the Katyn massacre began to live its life as a myth – telling the truth about Katyn was forbidden. The truth was contained in Special Folder No. 1 – a package of secret documents. It contained the order from the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Soviet Commu- nist (Bolshevik) Party (from hereon in the Politburo) about the "destruction" of 25,700 Polish prisoners of war, signed by Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and other members of the Central Committee and other papers that were tangent to this crime. Only the General Secretary of the Communist Party had the right to open this package. This was the biggest secret of the USSR. In the summer of 1969, in a forest near Kharkiv, three students from the surround- ing area accidently uncovered this secret. That, which only the General Secretary of the Communist Party knew of, was suddenly unearthed by several fifth graders! Summer vacation had just begun. The boys set out to look for treasure in the forest. Among the bones and skulls in the dug-up graves, they found gold wed- ding rings, gold teeth and buttons with Polish eagles on them. The local KGB learned about it almost immediately. The boys’ “treasure” was taken away. It was seemingly a small incident inspired by the books of Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain. But this small incident already prompted The War Myths 5 urgent reports between the Soviet authorities in Ukraine and the head office in Moscow: from Kyiv – the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Petro Shelest and from Moscow – by the head of the KGB of the USSR, Yuri Andropov. A few excerpts: “It has been determined that in 1940 the NKVD of the Kharkiv oblast buried here several (thousand) executed officers and generals of bourgeois Poland, whose remnants have now been accidentally discovered by children.” “Retired KGB employee, N.A. Halitsyn, who in the pre-war years was a driver for the state security organs and participated in the execution of the HFP (highest form of punishment – addition by O.Z.) sentence, explained after inspecting the found graves, that in April-May 1940 he participated in executing the decision to shoot about 13,000 officers and generals of bourgeois Poland…” This information was secured. Though these Soviet KGB documents state in black and white that in the spring of 1940, Polish officers were shot by the Soviet secret police, the public version was very different: “We consider it appropriate to clarify to the surrounding population that during the German occupation of Kharkiv, the German punitive organs carried out, without any honour, shootings against deserters and other criminal offenses of German soldiers and of- ficers and their allies at the location of these graves. At the same time, the Germans buried the dead from various infectious diseases (cholera, typhus, syphilis, etc.), and the so-called gravesite was to be recognized by the health authorities as unsafe to visit. This place is to be processed with chlorine bleach, placed under quarantine and then covered in soil.” This fact was secured: that the USSR’s KGB clearly recommended the spread- ing of rumours that the Germans created this grave site during their occupation of Kharkiv. Moreover, further KGB documents describe the plan “to eliminate special objectives” on several pages. Detention centers were created for this conspiracy work with a staff in 21 sub- divisions. They were given four vehicles to complete their tasks: the “GAZ-69” light truck, a dump truck, a tank truck and a truck for digging along with…13 tons of sodium hydroxide. It is not difficult to recreate their calculations – one kilogram of reagent for every one bone, with – according to the KGB – 112 graves, then there were 13 thousand killed who were buried. 6 The War and Myth. Unknown WWII The liquidation of the “special objects” was done under the guise of construct- ing KGB education centers. The script was very simple. The KGB had detailed plans of the Kharkiv graves. It was enough to drive the machinery, grind the bones, fill the graves with chemicals, flood everything with water – and then wait a bit. Their plan failed. The remains of the Polish prisoners of war survived. And, when in the early 1990s archaeologists began to excavate the former “NKVD special object,” this ugly history of destroying human graves also surfaced. For the USSR, it was not enough to build a virtual version of the past – sometimes the physical destruction of material evidence which contradicted Soviet his- torical myth was also needed. And here we come to the answer of how historical myths are formed. In this story, we see all the basic techniques of constructing myths in the USSR.