On the third Sunday of May in Ukraine the victims of political repressions, the victims of Soviet terror against its own citizens are commemorated.

Those, the communist regime was afraid of, were destroyed, condemned to death. Today in the memorial complex in Bykivnia commemorations will be held and attended by the leaders of the country.

More than 70 years ago in the forest near Kyiv, Soviet executioners buried more than 100 thousand people during four years... There were brought the bodies of those for whom there was no place left within the city limits. The scale of this tragedy shocks by its scope, cynicism and inhumanity. At night trucks, packed with human bodies, shuttled between the prison and cemetery; every night freight tram made two or three separate raids on the same route. The repressive machine worked smoothly, bloody and merciless. Bykivnia became a tomb for the best representatives of Ukrainian people: here lie the poets, writers, artists and actors, the military, scientists –“blossom” of the Ukrainian culture and science. The Soviet government was always afraid of truth and freedom, so it was simply destroying any grains of dissent. Millions of Ukrainians became the victims of this massacre, war with its own people.

When we can speak freely about it today, it should not be taken for granted. I want new generations of free Ukraine remember what price our people had to pay for the right to think and live according to their own choice. The understanding of what the long-suffering Ukrainian people have gone through provides the awareness of the importance and inviolability of human values, their place in the life of independent Ukraine.

In Ioan Pavel II book “Memory and Identity” we can find following words: “Nations, as certain individuals, are gifted with historic memory… People write history of the society they belong to… This history of nations, objectified and fixed in writing are the key element of culture – element, that is defining for the identification of nation in the timeline”.

Bykovnya is important in this search for identification. Tragedy, that happened here is in one line with such crimes as Baba Yar, Holodomor, Auschwitz. Almost till the end of 20th century communist regime was hiding the true goal of buries in Bykovnia and the real scale of tragedy. Today Ukraine is officially on its way of decommunization by disclosing horrible historical truth, and many are very hard to believe in it. That’s why the more we know about us, the faster we will understand our place in history itself.