Sixty-five years ago, on August 9, 1954, the Select Committee on Communist Aggression, U.S. House of Representatives, issued its Second Interim Report, based on oral testimony of 122 witnesses (and sworn written statements from many more) detailing Soviet aggression and mass murders of Ukrainian people in their native land.
The nine-man committee, headed by Rep. Charles J. Kersten (R-Wis.), with Edward M. O’Connor as committee staff director, had recently returned from its hearings held in London, Munich and Berlin. Previously, the committee held a series of hearings in Chicago and New York, where Ukrainian witnesses also gave testimony, as did representatives of other peoples behind the Iron Curtain. Other members of the committee included Reps. Fred. E. Busbey (R-Ill.), Alvin M. Bentley (R-Mich.), Edward J. Bonin (R-Pa.), Patrick J. Hillings (R-Calif.), Ray J. Madden (D-Ind.), Thaddeus M. Machrowicz (D-Mich.), Thomas J. Dodd (D-Conn.), Michael A. Feighan (D-Ohio), and Chief Counsel (Committee on Communist Aggression) James J. McTigue.
The report was forwarded to the House by Rep. Kersten so “that the members of the House will find it useful and that it will be carefully studied by those branches of the government concerned with the security of the United States.”
Among the testimonies the committee heard were witnesses’ recollections of the massacre of over 10,000 people in 1937-1938 by Communist secret police in the Vinnytsia region of Ukraine. In all, a total of 38 mass graves were discovered containing the remains of not only Ukrainians, but Poles and other nationalities as well.
The Vinnytsia Massacre, as it became known, was only one of some 19 similar examples of Communist mass murder in Ukraine during that period. Estimates at the time put the death total from 1937-1938 at more than 200,000 Ukrainians. A large number of the victims’ remains were found with their hands tied behind their backs and gunshot wounds to the back of the head, typical of Communist executions.
Further examples of Communist planning in the murders were described by witnesses of how one mass grave location was turned into an amusement park in Vinnytsia.
Zenon Pelensky, whose testimony was supplemented by voluminous documents and authenticated photographs and charts of the mass graves in Vinnytsia, told in remarkable detail the story of these crimes and why they had been visited upon the people of Vinnytsia. The Ukrainian people always refused to submit to and acknowledge the Bolshevik rule in Ukraine, he said. The terror imposed on Ukrainians by the Communists was an effort to break the national spirit and to discourage the people from any hope that one day they may be liberated from Communist rule.
When asked if the relatives of those people who were arrested by the NKVD (Soviet secret police, predecessor to the KGB) knew what had happened to their relatives and friends, one witness replied: “The mother of my daughter-in-law, after her husband had been arrested for crimes unknown to her, inquired of the NKVD why he was arrested and when would he be released. She was given only the answer that he had been sentenced to 10 years without the right of correspondence…”
Other witnesses corroborated the fact that this was the standardized answer given by the NKVD to friends and relatives of those who were murdered at Vinnytsia.
Ihor Zhurlyvy’s testimony summarized the experiences of many when he described the arrest of his father by the NKVD: “My father was arrested just as thousands and millions of other Ukrainians, for the reason that he loved Ukraine too much. Such Ukrainians were called bourgeois nationalists by the Bolsheviks.”
Source: “Kersten committee reports on Communist aggression in Ukraine,” The Ukrainian Weekly, August 14, 1954.