Voice of Ukraine

From Ira Kapitonova in Kyiv (Day 452):

Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling.
Psalm 2:11

This day, the third Sunday in May, is when we remember the victims of political repression. To most Ukrainian families, this is not just a static or historical fact. It is personal.

Usually, on this day, I share the story of my dad’s mother, my grandma Olena. They lived in the Kozatske village in the Kherson region. She was nine years old (my son’s age now) when she saw her father for the last time. Stepan was arrested and accused of anti-Soviet activity. We will never know how he actually felt about the Soviet regime, but his case files have clear signs of being fabricated. His wife and five children were labeled the “family of the enemy of the people,” the state confiscated everything they owned, including their home. Years later, in 1962, after Stepan’s children wrote numerous letters to the authorities to find out any information about their father, they received a note stating that he had died of pneumonia in a prison camp in 1942. The letter also said he was rehabilitated post-mortem due to a lack of corpus delicti. That’s all my dad knew about his grandfather, and that’s the story I heard in childhood when I asked about the man in the picture in my grandma’s cabinet.

After Ukraine declassified Soviet KGB archives in 2015, we learned that the reality was different. After being arrested on July 16, 1938, Stepan Somenko was executed on November 1, 1938. The cruelty of the Soviet regime knows no limits – it was not enough to ruin a person’s life and torment his family; they also had to feed them lies about the death of their loved one.

As I look back at this story, I take comfort in knowing that God has promised that “nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known” (Lk 12:2). I am looking forward to the day when the current Russian war crimes will be unveiled, and justice will be restored.

Last year, when I wrote a similar post, my great-grandfather’s native town was under Russian occupation. It was liberated last fall, along with the right bank of the Kherson region, yet it keeps suffering from Russian terror. Today, the residential areas of Kozatske village were shelled, and a man was killed.