• – Come out on the double! – ordered the NKVD agent.

• – With my things? – asked one of those named.

• – No need, you’ll be warm there!

Seven pairs of bare feet pattered across the floor, while behind them echoed the stomping of the NKVD agents’ hard heels and the clattering of their weapons. They all went down the stairs, through the prison yard, and entered the basement of another cellblock across from the prison chapel. It was as if the herald of death had appeared in our cell, and we had heard his message.

Not much time had passed before our hearts were pierced by the sound of muffled shots from the basement … So ended the thorny path of the first group of political prisoners, members of the OUN, in Brygidki. On the same day, several prisoners from our cell were called out. Others were called from all the other cells. The same happened in the other blocks.

The NKVD agents, investigators, prison attendants, and reinforcements from the outside worked day and night. They took out group after group; the number of people in our cell shrank. No one brought water or food to us. Why feed those the Moscow clique had condemned with a single ‘decree’?

Translated from Bohdan Kazanivs′kyi, Shliakhom ‘Legendy’: spomyny (London: Ukraïns′ka vydavnycha spilka, 1975), 195

Summary report by Chief of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs NKVD, Ukrainian SSR, Vasilii Timofeevich Sergienko, on NKVD operations to combat criminal elements in the western oblasts of Soviet Ukraine (January-May 1941). In Roman Shukhevych u dokumentakh radians′kykh orhaniv derzhavnoi bezpeky, 1940-1950, ed. Volodymyr Serhiichuk, vol. 1 (Kyïv, 2007), 232-33, 240-41.

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ОБЗОР

Работы органов НКВД по борьбе с бандитизмом в Западных областях УССР

За январь-июнь 1941 года

Органами НКВД УССР в 1941 году проведена значительная работа по ликвидации политического и уголовного бандитизма в Западных областях Украины.

С 1 января по 15 июня 1941 года в Западных областях ликвидировано 38 политических и 25 уголовных банд с общим количеством 273 активных участников. Арестовано также 212 пособников и укрывателей бандитов.