The Exhibition “Famine-Genocide and the Great Purge in Ukraine” is crime of the totalitarian regime”

The total extermination of millions of Ukrainians was a deliberate terrorist act of the political system of the Bolshevist government. A social basis of the Ukrainian people was destroyed; ancient traditions of spiritual and national culture suffered an irreparable damage.

The exhibition introduces the tragic events in the history of Sumy region during a totalitarian era. There are photographs and documents from the collections of the Sumy Regional Local History Museum and the State Archives of Sumy region atitsheart.

An important source of enlightenment of Famine-Genocide during the years 1921 – 1923 in Sumy region covers the materials represented in the exhibition: unique posters, bread cards, postcards of foreign charity organizations that helped the starving people and others.

A significant number of exhibits represent the events of Holodomor of 1932-1933 – genocide of the Ukrainian people. The documents about the struggle of the government against “counter-revolutionary appeals” not to join collective farms, peaceful and armed resistance to collectivization acknowledge extensive displays of the resistance of peasants against forced measures of the Soviet government. A tragic fate of Sumy region villages that got to the “black boards” (i.e. did not fulfill grain procurement plan) is revealed both in informational letters by special agents of the State Political Directorate and the materials of the regional press of that time.

An emotional center of the exhibition – the museum installation “Terror by famine” – is a specific symbol of the country strangled by a cruel communist party system. Its centerpiece represents a unique set of the materials belonged to D. Ya. Poladych, who lived in the village Bozhok, (today Chervonyi Ranok of Krolevets district), it comprises diaries with the memories of Holodomor, personal photos and the piece of “bread” baked of a plant substance, which his family ate during the famine.

The materials of the history of massive repressions during the period of the Great Purge 1930-40’s compose a separate part of the exhibition. These are resolutions and directives of the Soviet government, record keeping documentation of the investigative authorities and the decisions of Special troika. The victims of those repressions were in particular the famous natives and residents of Sumy region – culture and science figures P. M. Gubenko (Ostap Vyshnia), I. P. Lozov’yahin (Ivan Bahrianyi), B.D. Antonenko-Davydovych, N. Kh. Onats’kyi, M. O. Makarenko and others. A horrible evidence of a totalitarian pressure is specified in the documents about the fate of the pupils of Soldats’ke village school of Velykopysarivs’kyi district that were accused of the establishment of counterrevolutionary organization and sentenced to different terms of imprisonment. The documents and materials about a massive terror are exhibited against the background of a reproduced interior of NKVD (the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) prison chamber.

The memory of the victims is embodied by The Bell of Sorrow and the installation map which specifies the numbers of innocently killed in different regions of Sumy region during the Holodomor of 1932-1933.

The exhibition will work at the address: Sumy, 2, Herasym Kondratiev Street., daily from 9-00 till 17-00, except for Monday.