“All of a sudden, Russians with tanks arrived. It was a complete surprise. People felt this was better than the Germans and joked that we had expected the death penalty but received a life sentence”.
Lidia Eichenholz, a Jew from Rivne, moved to Dubno with her family at the beginning of the war; she was 15.
Used in reference to Soviet soldiers.
The chaos and uncertainty of the first weeks during which the Soviet regime established its power escalated into systemic repressions. These were initially handled by the operational groups of the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) that followed the Red Army units, and later by the permanent structures of the NKVD and the NKGB (People's Commissariat for State Security). The first wave of arrests targeted public servants of the Polish state. Members of political, public, and cultural organizations were also arrested. Soviet authorities viewed national movements (Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish) as a particularly serious threat.
There is no exact data on the number of arrests in Western Volhynia. Their scale can be gauged using information on arrests throughout all of Western Ukraine. Between September 1939 and February 1941, up to 55 thousand people were arrested in the region, including more than 21 thousand Poles, almost 20 thousand Ukrainians and almost 13 thousand Jews. The arrests continued until June–July 1941.
The outcomes of the arrests varied. Some people got released because the authorities were unable to prove their guilt. Most, however, were sentenced to longer or shorter terms of imprisonment and sent to Gulag camps. Individuals considered particularly dangerous to the Soviet regime were executed.
“…they started taking people away almost as soon as they got here. My uncle worked as a director of a Ukrainian gymnasium in Rivne. Two days after [the Soviet regime was established], he was shot. How could one survive that? Soviet authorities came and shot him right away”.
Mariia Botanievich, a Ukrainian from Ostroh, lived in the village of Liudvypol, Bereznivskyi district during the war. At its outbreak, she was 15 years old.
The beginning of the German-Soviet war had a lethal effect on the fate of those arrested. Preparing to retreat from the region, NKVD officers shot or otherwise killed about 6 thousand political prisoners in the Western Volhynia prisons. Soviet authorities decided against evacuating the prisoners and were afraid of letting them live. Mass shootings took place in Volodymyr, Lutsk, Kovel, Dubno, Kremenets, Rivne, Sarny, Ostrozhets, and Klesiv.
“They were forcing my father to go to work on Easter, because he had three horses. Father did not want to. He said: ‘I will not go’. The response was: ‘Oh, so you are fighting for Ukraine! Alright, then’. And then they came at night and took him away. They even shot the dog because it tore a soldier's greatcoat. They almost shot my aunt, because she said: ‘Oh, one master of the house taken away and another one killed’. They took him away, and I ran out onto the road, shouting: ‘Give me my dad back! Give me my dad back!’ After this, it was just our mother and us, the five of us".
Nina Lykhobytska, a Ukrainian from the village of Selets, was 9 years old at the time of her father's arrest.
Mass deportations, carried out by Soviet authorities in four waves over the course of 1940–1941, served as another tool of repression. Not only those deemed “socially hostile elements” were deported; the same fate awaited their families. Family members were also held collectively responsible for their relatives’ “offenses”. In total, over 190 thousand people were deported from Western Ukraine. Deportees ended up in remote areas of the Soviet Union, such as Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Far East.
Among the deported, some were refugees who had been forced to flee their homes in Poland after the start of World War II. The NKVD registered over 14 thousand of them in Western Volhynia. The Soviet regime treated such individuals with suspicion. Many refugees wanted to leave the territory of the Soviet Union, but not all were able to do so. Overall, more than 57 thousand refugees, most of them Jews, fell victim to deportation in Eastern Galicia and Western Volhynia.
One way to avoid persecution was to declare one’s loyalty to the authorities and obtain a Soviet passport. To do this, people often resorted to bribing Soviet officials. Such cases were not uncommon. In November 1940, a corruption scheme among passport service employees was uncovered in Rivne. One passport cost 1,500–2,000 karbovanets. At the same time, NKVD officers arrested a group of four people who helped individuals likely to become subject to persecution to obtain passports. Among them was engineer Yakiv Sukhenko, who came to Rivne from Kharkiv.
