War. Stories from Ukraine

Ukrainians tell stories about their life during the war

On February 25, the Russian army fired at the archive of the State Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in Chernihiv. As a result of the shelling, it burned down, and with it half a million documents stored there. A part of my family’s history burned down, too.

by | 5 April 2022 | Chernihiv, War. Stories from Ukraine

 

Illustrated by Tanya Guschina

 

The SBU archive in Chernihiv stored more than eight thousand criminal cases on residents of the region convicted in Soviet times. These were hundreds of thousands of interrogation protocols, verdicts, photographs, conclusions about rehabilitation or refusal of it. This was     unique information about human destinies, both victims and perpetrators of crimes, both the executed and the survivors.

Seven years ago, the criminal cases became available to everyone, Ukrainians and foreigners: descendants, journalists, historians. The archive staff helped visitors with the search, explained the specifics of working with the documents. Everyone could copy anything they needed using their own means: with a scanner, a camera, or even a phone.

These copies are the only thing we have left of the SBU archive in Chernihiv. However, it is only a few percent of what has been lost. 

Most often, people searched the archive for information about their relatives. There, I found a case about the death of my grandfather, Ivan Yatsenko. He was killed in 1948. A month later, his son was born, my dad. So he knew about his father only from photos and family stories.

After World War II, my grandfather Ivan worked at the military office in the district center. Once, residents of the village of Vaskivtsi, where he was from, came to him and offered to become the head of the village council. None of the locals wanted to take this position: in less than a year, four government representatives were killed in the village. Ivan agreed, but he only worked for half a year. He was shot during a meeting. My family hardly ever talked about these events.

 

 

 

Only two years ago, thanks to the documents stored in the SBU archive in Chernihiv, I learned that the killer was found the next day. He was a fellow villager, a criminal who had a personal conflict with my grandfather. The protocols of his interrogations, the testimonies of accomplices, eyewitnesses, even of my grandmother comprised the 334 pages of this criminal case from the SBU archive. It was a complex palette of bureaucratic wording and illegible handwriting, as well as information about related crimes: robbery, banditry, illegal storage of weapons. It was a somewhat absurd story of a post-war village in the Chernihiv Region, when the fact of theft of collective farm grain attracted more attention than the murder of a person.

Such cases are almost the only opportunity to learn about the fates of relatives, see their photos, touch objects that belonged to them.

A passport, a work record, jewelry, various references, private correspondence, awards—anything could become material evidence. However, there was nothing of the sort in my grandfather’s case. There was only the bullet that killed him. A silent witness. After the destruction of the archive, it is a mere piece of molten metal amid the ash.

 

 

The SBU archive in Chernihiv is not the only one we’ve lost access to as a result of the Russian aggression. Little is known about the state of such archives in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk, and now also in Kherson. Russians have attacked the buildings that stored archives in Kharkiv and Mykolayiv.

The archives are unlikely to be the Russians’ main target. But the totality of the war means that they also become its victims. It is the documents from the former Soviet archives in Ukraine that testify to the scale of crimes committed here during the 20th century.

Does the possibility of destroying them mean that the Russian crimes of today will eventually be forgotten as well? It’s just an illusion. The history of the 20th century taught us that memory is transmitted even under conditions of prohibition and silencing.


Translated by Olesja Yaremchuk

More stories