Pictures from the book βDrawings from the #GULAGβ by Danzig Baldaev, a retired Soviet prison guard. Through his eyes, we get to see some of the brutal acts of Soviet genocide performed on those imprisoned. How can anyone want to glorify Stalin?
In early December 1930, a Congress of the Folk Singers of Soviet occupied Ukraine, with 337 delegates from different oblasts, was held at the Opera Theatre in Kharkiv.
The stated objective of the congress was to involve the folk singers in the building of socialism and to give them new ideological priorities while distancing them from their traditions.
The kobzarists (Ukrainian bards, often blind, who sang to their own accompaniment on a bandura or kobza) were packed into train cars under the pretext of a trip to Moscow for the Congress of Folk Singers of the USSR and taken to the outskirts of the Kozacha Lopan station.
In the wake of the 2013 Euromaidan protests and the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the decommunization laws were signed by then-President Petro Poroshenko OTD May 15, 2015.
Under these laws, streets, towns, and institutions with Soviet-inspired monikers were renamed, and all Soviet flags, emblems, and military regalia were banned in Ukraine. This ban extended to any imagery bearing the likenesses of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.
Ukraine's Decommunisation Laws:
#1 βOn the Legal Status and Honouring the Memory of Fighters for Ukraineβs Independence in the Twentieth Centuryβ honours the fighters for Ukraineβs freedom [notably the Ukrainian insurgent army].
Ukrainians were frequently targeted for mass executions, deportations and violence by Stalin's Soviet regime. The citizens of one Ukrainian town, Vinnytsia, were virtually wiped out between the bloody years of 1937 and 1938.
When the extent of the massacre first came to light in 1943, a total of 9,439 bodies were found, with most indicating that a .22-caliber gun had been used to kill them execution-style. Of these corpses, 169 were identified as women.
Most of the victims had previously been sentenced to various prison camps in Ukraine. Most people quickly realised that since the camps were run by the NKVD, then it was likely that the victims had been killed by the NKVD.
Ukrainian Cossack hetman Pylyp Orlyk in 1710 created what is now argued to be one of the world's first constitutions. The document he published on the date of his election as hetman was an incredibly progressive document for its time.
Orlykβs constitution was a treaty between the Hetman, the Cossacks and the whole Ukrainian population, stating rights and responsibilities & also establishing a democratic standard for the separation of powers in government between the legislative, executive & judiciary branches.
The original copy of the constitution is kept in the National Archives of Sweden.